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Russia’s bid to return to the Moon comes to an ignominious end
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Russia’s first Moon mission in 47 years failed after its Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and smashed into the Moon on Aug 19.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Economist
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A rash of small, fresh craters across the lunar surface testifies to the international rush to return to the Moon by means of robot spacecraft. In April 2019, the gyroscopes on Beresheet, built by a public-private Israeli partnership, failed during the craft’s descent towards a patch of Mare Serenitatis, causing it to crash. In September that year, Chandrayaan-2, a mission by the Indian space agency ISRO departed from trajectory towards its landing site, not far from the Moon’s South Pole. The result was what ISRO’s chief called “a hard landing” – one sufficiently hard for the probe to have never been heard from again.
This April, a mission by ispace, a Japanese company, ended shortly after the Hakuto-R spacecraft decided that it had reached the surface of Mare Frigoris while still 5km above it, and turned off its engines. The Moon’s gravity is weaker than the Earth’s, but not by so much that a spacecraft can weather a fall from that distance.
