Launched in 2005, the Luna-25 program was to mark Russia’s great return to the race for the Moon, which is now seen as a new playground in the field of space. Its failure, confirmed on Sunday August 20 by a press release from the Roscosmos agency announcing the loss of this probe, finally sounds like a disavowal for the entire Moscow space program, after years of disappointment and billions of rubles swallowed up.
The objective was ambitious: launched on the night of Thursday August 10 to Friday August 11 from the new Russian cosmodrome of Vostotchny, in the Far East, Luna-25 was to land on the lunar South Pole. This was a first, as terrestrial devices usually land in the equatorial zone of the Moon, which is more conducive to maneuvering.
The interest of such an objective lies in the fact that water ice has been observed in the craters of this polar region. The probe was to take and analyze soil samples after its landing. Its predecessor, Luna-24, launched in 1976, had already allowed Soviet scientists to be the first to prove that the regolith (the thin layer of dust, produced by the incessant impact of meteorites, which covers the surface of the Moon ) contains water.
No questioning of Russian ambitions
Alas, the 800 kilogram device probably crashed when landing. “According to preliminary observations, the station ceased to exist following a collision with the lunar surface.indicated Sunday Roscosmos. Efforts to search for and contact the device yielded no results. »
This disappearance should not call into question Russian ambitions. These have been regularly reaffirmed by President Vladimir Putin, and they take on a particular dimension at a time when Moscow, excluded from a certain number of cooperation projects with the West because of the war in Ukraine, intends to deny any isolation or scientific downgrading. Several programs (sending lunar satellites or probes) must thus succeed Luna-25, with the desire to land cosmonauts in 2029, for the first time in Soviet and Russian history.
Still, the failure of the mission, launched fifteen years late, casts a harsh light on the state of Russian space programs. Since 1991, all attempts by Moscow to reach other celestial bodies have failed, in particular Mars-96 and Phobos-Grunt, which was to join one of the two satellites of Mars in 2011. Admittedly, Russia retains significant skills in other domains – launching of satellites, participation in the International Space Station… But it is becoming difficult to resuscitate the confrontation with the United States from the time of the Cold War.
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