An incident occurred on Saturday August 19 during a maneuver prior to the landing of the Russian probe Luna 25, indicated the Russian space agency Roscosmos, claiming “currently analyzing the situation”. “At 2:10 p.m., a pulse was emitted to transfer the probe to pre-landing orbit,” the agency first explained in a statement. “During the operation, an emergency situation arose 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 10-11 from the Russian Far East. In its press release, Roscosmos did not indicate on Saturday whether this incident would delay the moon landing of the probe scheduled for Monday north of the Bogouslavsky crater, on the lunar South Pole. She did not give more 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 nearly 800-kilo probe.
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.
