Unmanned craft spins out of control, underscoring decline of space programme since cold war peak
email rounding up the latestRussia’s first Moon mission since 1976, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, has ended in failure after its unmanned spacecraft Luna-25 spun out of control and crashed into the Moon’s surface.The setback for Russia’s increasingly isolated and cash-strapped Roscosmos space agency underscores the decline of Moscow’s space programme since its peak in the cold war when the Soviet Union was the first to send a person into space.
But on Saturday afternoon, as the craft was transitioning from a circular orbit about 100km above the Moon’s surface into a pre-landing orbit, communication was lost. “According to the results of preliminary analysis, due to the deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from the calculated ones, the Luna-25 spacecraft moved to a non-calculated orbit,” Roscosmos said in a statement. It then “ceased to exist as a result of collision with the surface of the moon.”
The Luna-25 was launched on August 10 from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East and marked the country’s first Moon mission since 1976, when the Soviet Union launched the Luna-24. That robot lander successfully returned to Earth carrying lunar soil samples for scientists to study.
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