Russia’s first lunar mission in decades fails after crashing onto the moon

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos was unable to contact the Luna 25 spacecraft after it crashed onto the lunar surface over the weekend, frustrating the country’s first lunar mission in decades.

Accordingly CNNThe incident happened after communications with the robotic spacecraft were lost, and it wasn’t immediately clear what caused the crash, but a specially formed commission is investigating the case. Covering the event, the medium pulled together insights from experts in the field, such as Victoria Samson, director of the Washington office of the Secure World Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to peaceful space exploration. She said, “They had a lot of problems. With quality control, with corruption, with funding.” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s former chief of science, said in one social media post that no one in the industry “wants ill for other explorers. We are reminded that landing on a celestial object is far from simple and straightforward. Just because others managed to do it decades ago is no guarantee of success today.”

The mission of the Luna 25 spacecraft was to study the composition of the lunar soil and its exosphere for a year.