Photo: Roskosmos
The Russian automatic station “Luna-25” was unable to perform a maneuver to transfer to a pre-landing orbit with the given parameters due to an “emergency situation.” This was announced on Saturday evening, August 19, by the press service of the state corporation Roskomos.
What happened to Luna 25?
Roscosmos said that at 14:10 on August 19, as planned by the station’s flight program, an “impulse was sent from Earth to transfer the station to a pre-landing orbit.” However, during this operation, an “extraordinary situation occurred on board Luna-25 that did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” the state corporation said.
Details of what happened in Roskosmos have not yet been reported, emphasizing that “the specialists of the management group are analyzing the situation.”
What is the difficulty of landing “Luna-25”?
Even before the official announcement of the “emergency situation” on Luna-25, the head of the Russian Space Policy Institute, Ivan Moiseev, in an interview with the BBC, said that it would not be easy to land the device on the surface of a natural satellite of the Earth.
“If she sits down, then she’s very lucky,” Moiseev said.
According to him, the difficulty of landing lies in the fact that it is impossible to accurately determine the quality of the surface in the place where the device is supposed to land on the moon from the Earth. The relief in a given place has not been studied, so setting up automation is not an easy task.
According to the specialist, it is precisely because of errors in planning and programming the very process of flight and landing that accidents most often occur.
Earlier, the head of Roskosmos, Yuri Borisov, estimated the chances for the success of the Luna-25 mission at 70%. At the NPO Lavochkin enterprise, which was involved in the creation of the station itself, these chances were estimated a little higher – at 80%, but the famous Russian astronomer and popularizer of science Vladimir Surdin, in an interview with RIA Novosti, voiced a less optimistic forecast, betting only 50% on success Russian lunar mission.
What results have already been shown by Luna-25?
Meanwhile, Roskosmos has already announced the first results of the work of Luna-25 scientific instruments in orbit of an earth satellite. As explained in the state corporation, during the flight, the specialists carried out several inclusions of scientific equipment and, after analyzing the data obtained, the scientists announced some technical results that are of great importance for the future of lunar missions.
For people who are far from the scientific and technical details of lunar exploration, the images from the surface of the Moon, which the station made using special television cameras during the flight in a circular orbit of the satellite, are of greater interest. Thanks to them, it became known what the Zeeman crater, invisible from Earth, looks like.
This unique object on the lunar surface is of great interest to researchers, Roscosmos said. In the top 20 deepest craters in the southern hemisphere of the moon, it ranks third. The interest of scientists in this crater is explained by an unusual ratio of sizes: with a diameter of 190 km, its depth reaches about 8 km. Scientists suggest that the crater was formed as a result of a very strong impact, that is, presumably, an unidentified object crashed into the Moon at a very high speed, or the substance of which this object consisted had a high density.
The photograph published by Roskosmos shows that the surface at the bottom of the crater is dotted with smaller ones. “This happens if part of the substance ejected during the impact fell back and created numerous small “potholes”, ”the state corporation explained.
Recall that Luna-25 was launched by Russia on August 11. This is a research mission to study the natural satellite of the Earth, which was initiated by Russia. Last Wednesday, August 16, the automatic station entered a circumlunar circular orbit, and it was supposed to land on the surface of the satellite on August 21. How the current “contingency situation” will affect the further course of the mission is not yet known.
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