The Russian Space Agency. Roscosmos, has lost contact with its Luna-25 spacecraft, and believes that it has been destroyed after crashing into the Moon. The craft was planned to land on the Moon on Monday 21 August 2023, but during a manoeuvre to enter Lunar orbit on Saturday 19 August a thruster rocket fired for 127 seconds instead of 84 as was planned, and contact was lost shortly afterwards.
The Lana-25 spacecraft was intended to land close to the Lunar South Pole, a region where there are theorized to be significant deposits of water ice, something likely to be of great use in the developing of any permanent Human outpost on the Moon. Discovering proof of this would have been a significant achievement for Roscosmos, demonstrating an ability to undertake serious space-exploration work without help from the European Space Agency, which pulled out of a supporting role in the mission following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This means that the first spacecraft to reach the area was be the Indian Chandrayaan-3 probe, which landed near the Lunar South Pole on 23 August.
The Soviet Luna-6 spacecraft performed the first successful soft landing on the Moon in February 1966, following the first successful orbit of the Moon by the Luna-3 spacecraft in October 1959. This orbiter-first-then-lander model was followed by the American Apollo Missions later in the 1960s, the Chinese Chang'e Program in the early twenty-first century, and most recently the Indian Chandrayaan Program, but has been skipped by recent the Russian attempt to return to the Moon.
This is the third Russian attempt to land a space probe on another Solar System body since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the third to have failed, with the Mars-96 mission to Mars in 1996 and the Phobos-Grunt mission to the Martian moon Phobos both having failed during their launch phase. The failure of the Luna-25 mission has now left many space experts both inside and outside of Russia questioning whether Roscosmos is capable of pulling of significant research missions on its own.
India, meanwhile, is celebrating the landing of the Vikram lander from its Chandrayaan-3 space mission, its's first successful lunar landing (the earlier Chandrayaan-2 crashed during a landing attempt in September 2019). The mission blasted off from Sriharikota Island, on the coast of Andhra Pradesh to the north of Chennai, on 14 July, taking a slower route to the Moon than most other missions, but one which used much less fuel, and which was therefore significantly cheaper), with the Vikram landing module separating from the main propulsion unit on 17 August, six days before eventually landing. If the mission continues as planned, the Pragyan Rover should shortly be deployed from the landing module, and spend the next few weeks exploring the area, and looking for the hoped for water ice.
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