Russia's 2023 Spacecraft Crashes Into the Moon on Lunar Mission

Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed into the moon after it span into an uncontrolled orbit, the country's space agency has reported.

"The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the moon," Roscosmos said in a statement, according to The Associated Press.

The lunar mission was Russia's first since 1976 and the failed attempt is the latest setback for a country that was the first to launch a satellite to orbit the Earth in 1957 during the Cold War.

The agency said it had lost contact with the unmanned spacecraft on Saturday after it ran into trouble while preparing for its pre-landing orbit.

"During the operation, an abnormal situation occurred onboard the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters," the agency said in a post on Telegram.

Roscosmos said a special inter-departmental commission had been formed to investigate the reasons behind the loss of the Luna-25 lander.

Luna-25 launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome in the far east of Russia on August 10 and was expected to land on the south pole of the moon on Monday.

If it had, it would have been the first ever to do so in an area where scientists believe there could be important reserves of frozen water and precious elements.

Now India will get that chance, as its Chandrayaan-3 mission launched in July, and has scheduled a landing attempt on the south pole of the moon on August 23. A previous Indian attempt to land at the south pole in 2019 ended when the spacecraft crashed into the moon's surface.

"It's unfortunate," Sudheer Kumar, a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization, told The New York Times about Luna-25's crash. "Every space mission is very risky and highly technical."

"So disappointing for all the scientists, engineers and explorers to see Luna 25 crash," Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. "All eyes now on India, attempting south Moon landing in three days."

Luna-25's predecessor, Luna-24, brought rocks from the surface back to Earth in 1976.

Two more spacecraft are expected to be sent up into the Moon's orbit in the coming years.

Luna-26 will be launched for "remote scientific measurements and as a possible communications relay for the next lander mission," while Luna-27's main goal will be to study the composition of soil near the south pole, the European Space Agency said on its website.

However, the agency withdrew its participation in the Russian mission after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022.