Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years failed after its Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and smashed into the moon.
Russia’s state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft shortly after a problem occurred as the craft was shunted into pre-landing orbit on Saturday.
“The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon,” Roskosmos said in a statement.
It added that a special commission was looking into why the moonshot failed. A Soyuz 2.1 rocket carrying the Luna-25 craft had blasted off from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles (5,550km) east of Moscow, at 2.11am Moscow time on August 11.
A picture taken from the camera of the lunar landing spacecraft Luna-25 shows the Zeeman crater located on the far side of the moon on Thursday. Photo: Roscosmos/Handout via Reuters
Failure for the prestige mission underscores the decline of Russia’s space power since the glory days of Cold War competition when Moscow was the first to launch a satellite to orbit the Earth – Sputnik 1, in 1957 – and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space in 1961.
