2023-08-19 16:48:00
Russia’s Roscosmos space agency has not said whether the incident will delay the probe’s moon landing scheduled for Monday.
Will Luna-25 be able to land on the moon on Monday? According to the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which claims to “currently analyze the situation”, an incident occurred on Saturday during a maneuver prior to the landing of the probe.
“At 2:10 p.m., a pulse was emitted to transfer the probe to pre-moon landing orbit,” the agency first explained in a statement.
“During the operation, an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic (lunar) station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” she added.
The first Russian lunar probe launched in nearly 50 years, Luna-25, was successfully placed in lunar orbit on Wednesday, after taking off on the night of August 10 to 11 from the Russian Far East.
A “risky” mission
In its press release, Roscosmos did not indicate whether this incident would delay the landing of the probe north of the Bogouslavski crater, on the lunar south pole. She also did not give further details on the circumstances of this technical problem.
Last June, Roscosmos boss Yuri Borissov admitted to President Vladimir Putin that the Luna-25 mission was “risky”.
“The probability of success of such missions is estimated at around 70%,” he said of the probe weighing nearly 800 kilos.
The mission is intended to give new impetus to the Russian space sector, which has been struggling for years due to funding problems and corruption scandals, and now isolated due to the conflict in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin has promised to continue the Russian space program despite the difficulties of the sector, taking as an example the sending by the USSR of the first man in space in 1961.
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