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.
