and then there's Russia:
Russia’s first lunar mission in decades has ended in failure with its
Luna 25 spacecraft crashing into the moon’s surface.
The incident, a blow to Russia’s space ambitions, happened after communication with the robotic spacecraft was interrupted.
Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said it lost touch with Luna 25 on Saturday around 2:57 p.m. Moscow time.
“The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get into contact with it did not yield any results,” the space agency reported.
According to a “preliminary analysis,” Luna-25 “switched to an off-design orbit” before the collision, Roscosmos said.
It was not immediately clear what caused the crash.
A specially formed commission will investigate the reasons for the loss of Luna 25, the agency added.
The news comes a day after the spacecraft reported an “emergency situation” as it was trying to enter a pre-landing orbit, according to Roscosmos.
“During the operation, an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” Roscosmos shared in a Telegram post on Saturday.
The spacecraft was meant to complete Russia’s first lunar landing mission in 47 years. The country’s last lunar lander, Luna 24, landed on the surface of the moon on August 18, 1976.
The Luna 25 probe launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Amur Oblast on August 10, setting the vehicle on a swift trip to the moon.
Luna 25’s trajectory allowed it to surpass India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander, which launched in mid-July, on the way to the lunar surface.
