Moscow: Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft which was launched with an objective to make soft-landing on the South Pole of the moon has crashed on the lunar surface, the space agency Roscosmos confirmed on Sunday. The Russian Space Agency said that the crash occurred due to a deviation between actual and calculated parameters of the propulsion manoeuvre which led Luna-25 to an unintended orbit resulting in collision with lunar surface.
“On August 19, in accordance with the Luna-25 flight programme, an impulse was provided to form its pre-landing elliptical orbit. At about 14:57 Moscow time, communication with the Luna-25 apparatus was interrupted. The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get in contact with it did not produce any results,” Roscosmos State Space Corporation said on its official Telegram channel.
The crash came hours after the Russian space agency reported some “abnormal situation” of Luna-25. Roscosmos said that the spacecraft encountered an unspecified issue during its attempt to enter a designated pre-landing orbit. The exact nature of the problem remains uncertain, and the agency’s experts are currently in the process of examining and evaluating the situation.
“During the operation, an abnormal situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” Roscosmos said in a Telegram post.
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