Summary Russia’s bid to return to the Moon comes to an ignominious end www.economist.com
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Russia's unsuccessful moon mission leaves behind small craters on the lunar surface.
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Key Points
- Russia's bid to return to the Moon has ended in failure.
- There has been a rush among countries to send robot spacecraft to the Moon, resulting in a rash of small craters.
- Several missions, including those by Israel, India, and Japan, have experienced failures and crashes during their attempts to land on the Moon.
- On August 20th, Russia announced that its Luna 25 mission also ended in failure after the probe collided with the surface of the Moon.
- The cause of the failure was a deviation in the propulsion maneuver parameters.
- This failure adds to the growing list of unsuccessful attempts to return to the Moon.
- The international space community now turns its attention to India's upcoming lunar mission.
- The race to return to the Moon highlights the challenges and risks involved in space exploration.
Summaries
29 word summary
Russia's failed attempt to return to the Moon adds to the list of unsuccessful missions. The lunar surface is now marked with small craters from failed robot spacecraft attempts.
41 word summary
Russia's attempt to return to the Moon has ended in failure, joining a growing list of failed missions by other countries. The lunar surface is now filled with small craters from various failed robot spacecraft attempts. In April 2019, Israel's Ber
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Russias bid to return to the Moon comes to an ignominious
end
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One down, one to go
Russias bid to return to the Moon comes to an ignominious
end
All eyes now turn to
India
image: AFP
Aug 20th 2023
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RASH OF
small, fresh craters
across the lunar surface testifies to the international rush to return
to the Moon by means of robot spacecraft. In April 2019 the gyroscopes
on
Beresheet
, built by a public-private Israeli partnership,
failed during the crafts descent towards a patch of
Mare
Serenitatis
, causing it to crash. In September that year
Chandrayaan-2
, a
mission by the Indian space agency,
ISRO
, departed from
trajectory towards its landing site, not far from the Moons south pole.
The result was what
ISRO
s chief called a hard
landingone sufficiently hard for the probe to have never been heard
from again. This April a mission by ispace, a Japanese company, ended
shortly after the
HAKUTO-R
spacecraft decided that it had
reached the surface of
Mare Frigoris
while still 5km above it,
and turned off its engines. The Moons gravity is weaker than the
Earths, but not by so much that a spacecraft can weather a fall from
that distance.
On the morning of
August 20th Russia announced that it had joined the ranks of the new
crater-makers. Its
Luna 25
mission, launched on August 11th,
entered orbit around the Moon on August 16th. It was due to undertake
its landing five days later. But on August 19th, just after its
controllers had told it to adjust its orbit in preparation, contact with
the probe was lost. On the morning of August 20th Roscosmos, the Russian
space agency, announced that a deviation between the actual and
calculated parameters of the propulsion manoeuvre led the
Luna 25
spacecraft to enter an undesignated orbit and it ceased to exist
following a collision with the surface of the Moon.
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