The story so far: On August 11, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, launched its Luna 25 spacecraft onboard a Soyuz 2 rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome. Luna 25 consisted of a lander and its mission was to soft-land near the moon’s south pole, and there study the optical, physical, and chemical properties of moondust and moon soil, and the atmosphere.
But on August 20, Roscosmos issued a statement stating that Luna 25 had suffered a glitch and crashed on the moon’s surface the previous day, ending the mission in a failure. While the event attested to the various challenges of autonomously landing a robotic instrument on the moon, the fate of Luna 25 also speaks to more than technical issues.
Why did Russia launch Luna 25?
The Luna 25 mission has technically been in the works for more than two decades. In the first decade or so, it was called Luna-Glob; the name was changed later to make the mission a part of the Luna series, the last edition of which, Luna 24, was launched in 1976. In its statement after Luna 25 failed, Roscosmos said one of the reasons to launch the mission was to “ensure Russia’s guaranteed access to the moon’s surface” – an allusion to the growing importance of the moon as a spaceflight destination and its importance as one of the sites of contest between the U.S. and China.
While Russia and China are together leading the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), versus the U.S.-led Artemis Accords, Russia has not executed a successful interplanetary mission in 34 years. Some experts have also said that Russia intended Luna 25 as president Vladimir Putin’s demonstration that the country’s economy – including the spaceflight sector – haven’t buckled under the weight of international sanctions following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2021.
Were Luna 25 and Chandrayaan 3 in a race?
Contrary to population perception, too many details are misaligned to expect that Luna 25 and Chandrayaan 3, or Roscosmos and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), were in a race. Both missions launched in a similar timeframe and were expected to attempt a soft-landing on the moon within days of each other.
However, these mission parameters are determined by the launch vehicle, the mass of the spacecraft, the earth-moon trajectory, and availability of sunlight at a point on the moon (to power solar panels).
In addition, while Chandrayaan 3 has been in development since 2019, Roscosmos was working on Luna 25 since the early 2010s, and couldn’t have anticipated the fate of Chandrayaan 2. Both missions also suffered unpredictable delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finally, recall that Russia pulled out of building the lander for Chandrayaan 2 due to delays imposed by the failure of the former’s Fobos-Grunt mission in 2011. Russia had otherwise been ISRO’s partner, and is also helping train Indian astronauts for the inaugural Gaganyaan mission.
Taken together, Luna 25 and Chandrayaan 3 couldn’t have been in a race.
What happened to Luna 25?
In its post-crash statement, Roscosmos said that it would put together a committee to investigate the precise mode of failure of Luna 25. Beyond that, Roscosmos has only said that the spacecraft suffered a technical problem that took its operation beyond the parameters within which the mission was designed to operate. While this statement is vague, it also suggests that the failure was related to some sort of extremum.
Speculation on social media platforms by spaceflight experts has centred on one event: that as Luna 25 attempted to modify its circular orbit around the moon to a lower pre-landing orbit, it applied more thrust than required, sending it careening to the surface. Roscosmos itself lost contact with Luna 25 as it was performing this manoeuvre.
Why couldn’t Roscosmos rescue Luna 25?
ISRO is receiving help from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to track Chandrayaan 3 around the moon. Their antennae will also maintain contact with the ‘Vikram’ lander as it attempts its soft-landing on August 23. But after Russia invaded Ukraine, it lost the goodwill of many countries worldwide, provoking stringent economic sanctions.
One of the less-known consequences was that Russia also lost its privileges to use satellite tracking systems operated by countries in different parts of the world. As a result, Roscosmos could contact Luna 25, and receive signals from the spacecraft, only at three stations: two in Russia and one in Russian-occupied Crimea.
In other words, Roscosmos could communicate with Luna 25 only when the moon was directly over Russia. As a result, the size of the window that scientists had to fix the problem and salvage the mission was much smaller.
This said, they did attempt to contact the lander in this window but it didn’t respond. More details should be available in the failure analysis report.
What next for Roscosmos, and Russia?
Whatever the technical reasons for the failure of Luna 25, it’s clear that Russia is falling behind in the race to the moon. Before the ILRS, Russia had joined hands with NASA to build a near-moon space station. But before it backed out of the partnership in January 2021, Roscosmos’s role in the enterprise was found to be highly limited.
In the ILRS setup, Roscosmos has already planned for Luna missions 26 and 27 as part of the first phase of operations, which include technology demonstration and site selection for future lander missions.
Now, with the failure of Luna 25 and the sanctions imposed by Western countries – which will limit the components that Russia can import – their respective launch dates could be pushed further from 2027 and 2028.
