What Happened To Russia’s Luna 25 Lander?
Just over a week ago on August 10th, Russia launched a Soyuz rocket carrying a special payload. On board was the country’s first lunar lander in nearly 50 years, since the Luna 24 mission in 1976. Unfortunately, reports are now coming out that the lander crashed into the Moon and the mission has failed.
Starting yesterday, an emergency situation was reported in lunar orbit not long before the touchdown attempt. The original plan was to launch on the 10th and land safely on the Moon between the 21st and 23rd, only days away. However, a problem came up during an engine burn that didn’t allow a specific maneuver to occur. Roscosmos then later reported that they had lost contact with the lander, but were trying to reach it and get any type of signal back.
By now, the agency is confident that the lander was destroyed, and is now working to determine exactly what went wrong. This is quite the blow to the agency and program which was the first attempt to revive it after decades. Here I will go more in-depth into the exact flight profile, what went wrong, the events that led to this, and more.
Emergency Situation
The Luna-25 mission lifted off on the 10th at 7:10 p.m. EDT atop a Soyuz-2.1b rocket. The launch was nominal and the lunar lander was successfully deployed, expected to take about 5 days to reach the Moon. As planned, on August 16th, the probe entered lunar orbit, this is also where problems would start to occur.
Only a few days later on the 19th, Roscosmos declared an “abnormal situation” on the lander after issuing an unsuccessful command for a short engine burn to move the lander into a pre-landing orbit. Specifically, talking about the engine burn, Roscosmos was quoted saying, “During the operation, an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters. The management team is currently analyzing the situation.” At that point in time, Roscosmos was still trying to contract the lander and weren’t sure exactly what had happened or even the state of the probe.
This was until early this morning when they released a statement on what happened and the result. Translated to English its quoted saying, “At about 14:57 Moscow time, communication with the Luna-25 spacecraft was interrupted. The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get into contact with it did not produce any results. According to the results of a preliminary analysis, due to the deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from the calculated ones, the device switched to an off-design orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface. A specially formed interdepartmental commission will deal with the issues of clarifying the reasons for the loss of the Lander.”
While even this statement doesn’t share too much information, it confirms that the engine burn complication managed to eventually send the lander crashing into the Moon. What was meant to slow and transfer the probe ended up placing it on a completely different trajectory.
In terms of how this happened, there are a few important details that we know of. For example, this mission was most recently delayed from early July to Agusut when it eventually lifted off. At the time Roscosmos was quoted saying, “It was established that it would be appropriate to launch the Luna 25 spacecraft in August 2023”. They went on to say that the spacecraft is now going through the final cycle of ground tests. “Statistic simulation of the mission’s key stage — a soft landing on the lunar surface — is now nearing completion,” a spokesperson said. In other words, it seems as if they had delayed the mission to continue testing the landing process and make sure everything was in working order.
In addition, the lander was trying to land on the Moon’s South Polar Region. An area of interest not only to Russia but most space agencies around the world and the location of future Artemis Missions. This is relevant to the crash because it also is a much more difficult area of the Moon to land on. The terrain near the equator is generally flatter compared to the rugged moonscape of the south polar region. Lunar Landers have to navigate their way past high mountains and deep craters to reach this specific landing site. This need for extra precision and maneuvers could have impacted the Luna 25 mission outcome. Something we will hopefully learn more details about in the coming months.
Luna 25 Overview
The loss of this mission is quite a blow to the Russian space program. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has not successfully sent a probe to the Moon. This mission was supposed to change that. It’s also important to point out that the agency has been working on this specific lander for a very long time.
Plans for what became Luna 25 began in the late 1990s, with the evaluation of two spacecraft designs having taken place by 1998. Attempts to revive and complete the project continued throughout the 2000s and were punctuated by an aborted attempt at international cooperation via a merger with JAXA’s now-cancelled Lunar-A orbiter, and pressure from another attempted cooperative lunar mission with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) (which continued without Russia’s involvement).
Delays in the 2010s came first from the significant rework and delay brought on by the failure of Phobos-Grunt in 2011. This is the point at which the modern Luna 25 design was developed. Later, work on the lander was slowed by resource pressures being placed upon the spacecraft developer. In 2017, it was reported that the propulsion system for the lunar lander had been in assembly, along with support systems for the antenna feeder and the holding truss for the onboard equipment of the lander.
Not to mention, Luna-25 was being described in the media as being in a race with India’s lander to set down near the moon’s south polar region. Only yesterday India’a lander successfully lowered its lunar orbit, setting it up for a landing attempt at a similar latitude to Luna 25. The landing is expected around 8.34 a.m. Eastern Aug. 23. A further mission, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) by Japan’s space agency JAXA, is scheduled for launch on a H-2A rocket Aug. 25. SLIM is a landing technology demonstrator aiming to make exploration more precise and economical.
Focusing back on the Luna 25 lander, it was meant to do a lot more than just land on the Moon. There were two primary scientific objectives of the mission: to study composition of the polar regolith, and to study the plasma and dust components of the lunar polar exosphere. The lander had a four-legged base containing the landing rockets and propellant tanks, an upper compartment that held the solar panels, communication equipment, on-board computers, radiothermal heaters and radiators, and most of the science apparatus. The dry mass was about 800 kg, and it had roughly 950 kg of propellant at launch. The lander had a 1.6 meter-long Lunar Robotic Arm (LRA, or Lunar Manipulator Complex) to remove and collect the surface regolith to depths of 20 to 30 cm. The LRA was equipped with a scoop (175 cubic cm volume) and a sample acquisition tool, a 4.7 cm long tube with an internal diameter of 1.25 cm. The arm has four degrees of freedom / rotations: azimuthal, shoulder, elbow, and wrist/scoop. Total mass of the LRA is 5.5 kg, it uses 30 W nominal, and 50 W maximum power.
In total there were eight science instruments. This included a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer to study the surface regolith. An instrument that detects charged particles and neutrals in the polar exosphere. An infra-red spectrometer, that measures surface water and OH and is mounted on the LRA, and many more.
As far as the future, Luna 25 was also supposed to have demonstrated technologies that would have been used in a series of robotic missions that Russia plans to launch to the moon to lay the groundwork for a future lunar base that it is planning to build with China. However the schedule for those missions — Luna 26, 27 and 28 — has already been delayed multiple years, and now with the recent failure, will likely only get pushed back even more. Roscosmos now has a difficult decision of whether to redo the Luna-25 mission or leave the landing technology untested for now and move on to more ambitious follow-on missions. If Russia does decide to re-fly Luna-25, that will likely add additional years of delay.
The reason Russia tried and other agencies are all heading to this specific lunar location is because of its unique characteristics. While challenging, the lunar south pole region is deemed a compelling spot for future exploration missions and suitable for a lunar outpost. The permanently shadowed places on the Moon could contain ice and other minerals, which would be vital resources for future explorers. The mountain peaks near the pole are illuminated for large periods of time and could be used to provide solar energy to an outpost. With an outpost on the Moon scientists will be able to analyze water and other volatile samples dating back to the formation of the Solar System. Benefits that are worth the risk for agencies around the globe.
Conclusion
Earlier this month Russia launched its first lunar lander in nearly half a century. Everything was going well until the probe reached orbit and issues came up surrounding the main engine burn. It was then determined that the lander had crashed and contact could no longer be made. We will have to wait and see how it progresses and the impact it has on the space industry.