Russia pinpoints reason for moon mission failure, aims to prepone next missions

Russia said on Tuesday that it was looking at accelerating the schedule for two more missions after its lunar lander crashed onto the moon in August due to a problem with an on-board control unit.

On August 19, the Luna-25 spacecraft crashed, ending Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years and ending Moscow’s aspirations of racing India to the moon’s unexplored south pole. On August 23, an Indian spacecraft made a landing there.

The control unit failed to shut off the propulsion system, which allowed it to run for 1.5 times longer than necessary as the spaceship hurtled towards the moon, according to the state-run space corporation Roscosmos.

The disaster highlighted Russia’s declining space prowess since the height of the Cold War rivalry, when Moscow launched Sputnik 1, the first satellite to orbit the Earth, in 1957, and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to enter space in 1961.

The head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, stated that an inquiry committee had finished looking into what went wrong and was putting together a report for the government.

He declared that Russia was committed to continuing its lunar exploration programme.

“Moreover we are considering the possibility of moving forward the Luna-26 and Luna-27 missions in order to get the results we need as quickly as possible.”

He made no mention of the potential timing of these missions.

Luna-26 would be an orbital mission, and Luna-27 would be a lander equipped with a drilling machine, according to earlier statements from Russia. Russia and other nations are interested in figuring out how much frozen water there is close to the south pole of the moon that might one day support human habitation.

Roscosmos said its preliminary analysis of the August crash showed that “when issuing a corrective pulse to transfer the spacecraft from a circular lunar orbit to an elliptical pre-landing orbit, the Luna-25 propulsion system worked for 127 seconds instead of the planned 84 seconds”.

According to the report, faulty data commands caused the on-board control system of the spacecraft’s angular velocity measuring unit to malfunction. The propulsion system did not turn off as it should have.

The Kremlin has downplayed the mission’s failure and stated that Russia will continue to pursue bold space objectives.

The International Space outpost, where Russian cosmonauts have resided and worked alongside counterparts from the United States and other nations since 2000, is being replaced by a new Russian orbiting outpost.

Turkey, Brazil, and South Africa, according to Borisov, had expressed a great interest in participating in the game.

(With agency inputs)