2023-08-22 17:39:44
When NASA boss Bill Nelson was asked about the Russian moon probe Luna-25 two days before its launch, he politely wished her all the best. She could use that too. After all, Russia has had bad luck with missions beyond Earth orbit for decades. Even in Soviet times, the country had real successes only on the moon and Venus. The country failed again and again on Mars, and the two interplanetary missions attempted after the fall of the Soviet Union – “Mars 96” in 1996 and “Phobos-Grunt” in 2011 – ended particularly poorly while still in Earth orbit.
But that’s not the only reason why it would have been a surprise if Luna-25 had made the planned landing in the south polar region of the moon. Technically, the project had nothing to do with the successful Luna missions from 1966 to 1976. This tradition of know-how has long since been torn down – and when trying to build on it, Russia suffered from its self-inflicted isolation. After Putin’s attack on Ukraine, the Europeans refused to cooperate and thus, for example, refused to supply a navigation camera. The purchase of a special component for the Luna-25 from Airbus also failed due to the sanctions and made an in-house development necessary, which contributed to the considerable delays in the project.
Now Luna-25 crashed on the lunar surface last Saturday and on Monday evening the Russian space organization confirmed what was already circulating in space circles: when the probe was decelerated from its transfer orbit in a hundred kilometers above the lunar surface to 15 kilometers in preparation for the landing, the brake engines had boosted for too long. The probe, which was decelerated too much, had therefore hit the moon at about 5000 kilometers per hour. Whatever exactly may have caused the error: The sources of error as a result of sanctions-related replanning, together with a lack of experience with such missions, may have greatly reduced the chances of success.
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So maybe tomorrow, Wednesday, August 23, it will be the Indian probe Chandrayaan-3 that will make the first soft landing in the deep south of the moon, where this maneuver is particularly difficult. The Indians, like the Chinese before them, had cooperated with the Russians on their first interplanetary missions, but then went on their own after the Phobos-Grunt debacle.
What has remained is a primarily Chinese-Russian cooperation called “International Lunar Research Station”, as its component Luna-25 operated and which is intended as a counterpart to the moon plans of Americans and Europeans. The Luna-25 crash may have now rocked Russia’s chances of collaborating even with its remaining friends on high-profile space projects.
#consequences #failure #Luna25