Moscow failure. Russia has failed to make history and become the first country to successfully land on the south pole of the Moon, a region with significant water reserves whose control is disputed by the main space powers. robotic probe moon-25the first in more than 40 years that this country launched to Earth’s satellite, had problems on Saturday after an approach maneuver to the pre-landing orbit, according to Roscosmos, which ended up causing the mission to fail.
“The device moved into an unforeseen orbit and ceased its existence as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon,” the Russian space agency has reported. Moscow lost its communication with the ship after the maneuver and, although it tried to recover it for hours, it has finally confirmed the worst outcome.
On Saturday, during an impulse to move the module towards the pre-landing orbit, “an emergency situation arose on board the robotic probe” -as Roscosmos explained on the same day- “which did not allow the maneuver to be carried out with the specified parameters”. .
“About 14.57 Moscow time [13.57 hora peninsular española]communication with moon-25. The steps taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and make contact with it did not yield any results,” Roscosmos explained today. According to the results of the preliminary analysis, the boost given to the spacecraft was greater than calculated, so the probe changed into too steep an orbit and crashed into the lunar surface.
Our satellite does not have an atmosphere, so ships cannot use parachutes to slow down and must pin all their hopes on the use of retrorockets and a good automatic landing system in an uneven area. Only the United States, Soviet Russia, and China have successfully landed on the moon, and until today, no one has managed to land on the South Pole.
The failure deals a setback for Russia’s space program when the country is mired in the war in Ukraine and weakened by economic sanctions imposed by Western countries. Moscow announces that a commission will be created to clarify the reasons for the loss of the ship.
Russia’s earlier attempt to launch into deep space beyond Earth orbit set a bad precedent for Moscow. In November 2011, it launched the probe Phobos-Grunt towards the moon of Mars, but ended up falling to Earth in January after Roscosmos lost connection with the probe shortly after launching it into space.
Only India left
Days before, both the moon-25 like her competitor Chandrayaan-3, launched by India, had successfully completed their maneuvers to fix their lunar orbit from which they would descend to land at the South Pole. The Indians plan to land on Wednesday the 23rd at 9:34 p.m. Spanish peninsular time. Its great asset is that, unlike the Russian probe, the Chandrayaan-3 It carries a small mobile robot inside to explore the environment near its landing site.
The apparatus, of more than a ton and three meters high, sent one of its first images to Earth on Friday. It was from Zeeman crater, a depression near the south pole on the far side of the moon. “The resulting images significantly complement the information currently available about this crater,” the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI), responsible for the spacecraft’s scientific instruments, said in a press release. “The first image of the far side of the Moon was obtained in October 1959 by the Soviet automatic station moon-3″, he added.
The Russian spacecraft was due to touch down north of Bogulawsky crater, a huge 95-kilometer-diameter impact basin whose depths, never reached by sunlight, can contain vast amounts of frozen water. This compound is the new lunar gold with which future space missions want to obtain fuel for rockets and oxygen and water to sustain future human bases on the satellite. Although the United States is undoubtedly the most advanced country in this new space race, Russia and India were fighting this week to be the first to land on the hostile southern territory of the Moon.
the landing of moon-25 it would have been done completely automatically. Those responsible for the mission had no chance of maneuvering from Earth and had to trust the probe’s programming so that it would slow down using the retrorockets and land on the planned landing zone. The elevation of the terrain could not be greater than 15 degrees so that the ship would not capsize and the speed had to be that of a person walking slowly. To make sure they didn’t fail, engineers had marked out a wide landing ellipse 30 kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide near the Bogulawsky crater.
The moon-25 He intended to make history by touching the water of the Moon for the first time. Since two space probes launched by India and the United States found the first signs of ice at the lunar poles in 2009, there has been a race to determine how much water is on the moon and lay the groundwork for its exploitation. The moon-25 It was equipped with a robotic arm to dig a few inches into the ground until it found ice, insert it into its bowels and analyze it with various instruments to determine its composition. The ship also contained other instruments capable of analyzing the composition of the terrain from a distance and determining the presence of ice, as well as thorium, potassium and uranium.
Those responsible for the mission hoped that the probe would begin to function and carry out experiments as soon as it had landed. moon-25 it was the first in a series of missions with which Russia intended to fight for a role in the new space race. According to Roscosmos’s plans before the failure, Moon-26 it would be an orbital probe that they will follow Moon-27equipped with a drilling rig to penetrate five feet into the ground, and Moon-28, which will bring samples from the Moon’s polar region to Earth. The last ship in history that achieved something like this was precisely the probe Moon-24launched by the Soviet Union in 1976. Although by then, the United States had already won the space race with the Apollo astronauts.
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