Russia’s Luna-25 probe, whose mission is to be the first spacecraft to land on the moon’s south pole, failed on Monday to reach the required orbit to land on the moon’s surface, Russian space agency Roskosmos said on Saturday. .
“During the work at the automatic station, an emergency situation arose that did not allow the maneuver to be carried out according to the planned parameters,” the Roscosmos message said, circulated on Telegram.
Problems aboard the ship arose when at 14:10 Moscow time (12:10 Lisbon time) the engines launched Luna-25 into a pre-lunar landing orbit, writes the Spanish news agency EFE.
“The situation is currently being analyzed by experts from the control group,” the official statement said.
The spacecraft, launched on Aug. 11 from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East, entered orbit on Wednesday after spending five days and almost 10 hours on the journey.
At all times, Roskosmos reported that the probe systems worked normally, sending images of the lunar surface to Earth and recording, among other phenomena, the fall of a micrometeorite.
The probe was supposed to land on the lunar surface on August 21, two days before the Indian probe Chandrayaan-3, which launched on July 14.
Luna 25, the successor to the Soviet Luna 24, the third spacecraft to explore the lunar surface in August 1976, hopes to find water in the form of ice on the Moon.
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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