Russian space agency Roscosmos said today that Russia’s Luna-25 probe, whose mission was to be the first spacecraft to land on the moon’s south pole, failed to enter the orbit required to land on the moon’s surface on Monday.
“During the operation at the automatic station, an emergency situation occurred that prevented the maneuver from being carried out according to the planned parameters,” Roscosmos wrote in a statement posted on Telegram.
Problems on board the spacecraft arose when the engines propelled Luna-25 at 14:10 in Moscow (12:10 in Lisbon) into a pre-landing lunar orbit, according to Spanish news agency EFE.
“The situation is currently being analyzed by experts from the monitoring group,” the official statement read.
The spacecraft, which was launched on Aug. 11 from the Vostochny cosmodrome in the Russian Far East, entered orbit on Wednesday after a flight of five days and nearly 10 hours.
At all times, Roscosmos reported that the probe systems were operating normally, sending images of the lunar surface to Earth and detecting the impact of a small meteorite, among other phenomena.
The probe was scheduled to land on the lunar surface on August 21, two days before the launch of India’s Chandrayaan-3 probe on July 14.
Luna-25, the successor to the Soviet Luna-24, the third spacecraft to test the lunar surface in August 1976, hopes to find water in the form of ice on the moon.
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