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Sunday, August 20, 2023

Landing on the Moon is hard

 “Russia’s lunar lander smashes into moon’s surface”—The Hill. From the article:

Russia’s first mission to the moon in 47 years failed on Saturday when its lunar-landing spacecraft crashed into the moon’s surface, Russia’s space agency said on Sunday.

Luna-25 was planned to make a soft landing on the moon’s surface on Monday. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said it lost contact with the spacecraft as it was preparing to enter the pre-landing orbit. Efforts to locate the unmanned spacecraft failed, it said. 

Roscosmos said, citing a preliminary analysis, that the spacecraft entered an “uncalculated orbit” after actual pulse parameters deviated from the ones the agency calculated, and it “ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface.”

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