Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft crashes into Moon
Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed into the Moon after spinning into an uncontrolled orbit, officials say.
The unmanned craft was due to make a soft landing on the Moon's south pole, but failed after encountering issues as it moved into its pre-landing orbit.
It was Russia's first Moon mission in almost 50 years.
The spacecraft was scheduled to land on Monday to explore a part of the Moon which scientists think could hold frozen water and precious elements.
Roskosmos, Russia's state space corporation, said it lost contact with the Luna-25 shortly after running into difficulties.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66562629Open linkView original on lemmy.world830
Comments160
I'd like to remind all people to tone down the edge a little. Inflammatory quips and sarcastic remarks about the war have been done enough and any future ones will be removed, starting now.
Normally, I'd say that it's a great shame that a piece of valuable scientific equipment was lost and that it's a massive loss to humanity as a whole as the international scientific community is usually able to co-operate regardless of boarders.
But this time, Russia said they won't be sharing any data gathered from this probe with the international community and would be keeping it all to themselves so suddenly I don't give a shit.
I agree but I'm also happy that Putin doesn't get a win by presenting this as "Russia is great and all because of me".
Reminds me state TV propoganda "no Putin - no Russia".
Technically he won, otherwise it was vicroty of science over Putin's corruption.
I'm huge space nerd, but I personally wouldn't say that loss of space mission is a loss for humanity.
If the James Webb had failed to deploy, I would have been fucking pissed. That would have been a massive loss for humanity.
A random moon probe, not so much. I’m almost happy Russia is denied the good space PR and nationalism bump.
How much data did they gather from the probe?
Just enough to prove their extreme level of incompetence in doing anything at all.
I wonder why. Maybe they were going to sell it to China? Or maybe putting random sycophants in the position of running their space program leads to this type of political stunt.
Maybe they actually found something amazing and this is a cover story so we dont try to force them to share it.
Edit: wow why did this get downvoted? It was satire...
Could be, but I assume Putin would prefer a successful mission for propaganda purposes domestically and to the rest of world.
you didn't put the '/s'
Well, they actually hit what they were aiming for at least.
Oh no, don't worry, they're still doing that
Murdered by words
yeah that's a bullseye
Sucks for the scientists / engineers.
I wonder how long until we start hearing about them “falling” out of windows.
maybe that already happened to some of them and that's why this happened
Ok, so I wonder if the engineers/data scientists sabotaged this on purpose
I wonder how long until we stop hearing these stupid jokes.
Jokes?
It's probably too early for this to be a reason for the crash, but Russian brain drain after their full-scale Ukrainian invasion is real.
Brain-drain is going for last 20 years of Putin presidency
Any setback for science is a setback for humanity… but at the same time, Russia fucking up is not totally unexpected.
Well, if 80% of budget is stolen for new Rogozin's mansion, I'm surprised it didn't explode at lauch pad.
Fuck the Russian government, but you still hate to see something like this happen.
No, I actually don't. This was never going to be scientifically meaningful. It was nothing but a vanity project that went exactly how it deserved to.
Is this false?
Is the russia gov reviving the 'Luna' mission name and mission type after decades coincidence when russia is heavily sanctioned by the west and in need of showing it is a industrial and scientific powerhouse? At a time it is according to its own gov 'at war with NATO', just like during the cold war?
Doing exploration & science when you go is a given, but it is disingenuous saying that Russia started this mission out of pure scientific interest. The same can of course be said of US moon or Mars programs.
The difference however is this one failed its obvious primary objective: showing that Russia = strong, and that at a time that Russia is desperate for a succes, not another example that it is a shithole.
There's a lot of reasons, including passing on knowledge from the people who did Luna 24.
I'm also pretty sure Luna 25 has been worked on since at least 2017, not to mention that Luna just means moon.
I doubt it since India has a mission right now to do the same thing.
It's not false, but from Russia it's worthless. China and India have actually competent missions to the same region planned, and the US's Artemis 3 crewed mission is also planning to land in that region by 2026. This was absolutely an incompetent rush job attempt to beat everybody else to the punch in the name of "Russian Superiority".
They also had announced that they wouldn’t be sharing any of the scientific data gathered
Coming from the Russian government, who cares? They're so incompentent and dishonest that none of their results could be trusted.
It's not, but they already said they weren't going to share any results with the international community, so nothing of scientific value was lost anyways
There's nothing vain about looking for rocket fuel outside the gravity well, the only question is "why now?"
Based on what I know about Russia they would probably claim moon as part of Russia and then bomb the 1969 moon landing site with cluster munitions. Fuck em
No, that would be what the US had planned to do. This was right after spudink as to one up the USSR.
Fuck corruption.
Boy, that Russian missile REALLY missed the pre-school in Kiev they were aiming for.
*Kyiv
This transliteration is so freaking weird. Letter Ы should be agreed to English Latin alphabet.
There's no bI in Ukrainian.
There is Ы sound. Which is how Kyiv should be pronounced.
Ukrainian И produces near-front near-close unrounded vowel.
Russian ЬІ produces close central unfounded vowel.
Do not pronounce Kyiv with the latter. The articulation is just not as comfortable as the native one.
Russian to Ukrainian mapping: ы - и и - i й - ï
This made me laugh more than it should.
They rushed a project to compete with NASA's VIPER rover and just wanted to be first.
They were also trying to be the Indian team, who are taking a longer time using gravitational whip to send their mission to the Moon’s pole.
They were actually always pretty good at unmanned missions. This was the same design from the 1970s.
The Russians have a bunch of crashed spacecraft on Mars and no successful Mars landings.
The Soviets were also the only ones to successfully put a lander on Venus, and accomplished this in the 70s. They were a powerhouse when it came to unmanned missions: even with more primative control systems they had to work with.
Of course with the fall of the USSR all the smart people behind those successes could leave, so ...
20+ years of hardcore corruption do wonders!
Yeah historically we've used them a ton for collaborations in space architecture. I can't share too much but my team has worked with them, before my time, and they refused to make any advancements in certain systems. Since then collaboration has been incredibly difficult but not because of Russia's engineers.
That is basically the rough history of our planets space exploring ventures. American/russia one upping each other.
Well, it worked quite well during Soviet times.
Laika is still up there and happy...
There's no sources on this that I could find and It's definitely a weird thing to claim.
Why is it weird? Russian and American scientists have been competing for decades
They will say Nato/US/Ukraine hacked into the spacecraft and made it crash. You heard it here first.
Essentially my narcissistic ex: everything bad that has ever happened to her is someone else’s fault.
so you're saying Steven Segal likes Russia because it's sort of a home for Narcissism.. yeah, i guess i can see that..
You chose Segal over Trump for narcissists sucking on Russia's tit?
Porque no los dos
oh yeah, forgot that one
Let's bet on money? I think they won't.
Huh. I don't see any hexbears or Lemmygrads on this thread. Interesting. Can't complain.
God it is validating to see you say that. I'm new to the platform, reddit refugee, and am bombarded by what appears to be hard core communists. It's exhausting.
Also the fact that they all act like /r/the_donald trolls
Nothing makes me less inclined to hear out your opinion when you're acting like a middle schooler whose trying to look cool in front of his friends lol
They are not communists, they are russian apologists.
They're tankies.
Tankies used to care about communism. Now they're just anti-western. They will not question if Russia or China are actually communist because it doesn't matter. They don't care about worker protections or freedoms. They only care about "owning the west."
Yeah I find them rather funny... I'm antiamerican and leftist but many seem to think that it's a binary and we must choose.
Having actually lived and worked in China for the CPC, I find their idolizing of the modern Chinese nation-state a bit laughable
Fuck Putin, fuck Stalin. Peace to world, glory to science and production, mechanize ancillary work, reduce manual labour.
Here's a little bit of communism you didn't want.
Not communists. (Also, most of them have never made a commit. They didn't do anything.)
Sure, the original developer runs Lemmygrad. Doesn't matter. The great thing about FOSS is that no one owns it. There have been many contributers, not just the first person. Also, anyone can fork it if things go bad. No one owns FOSS. You can use it and contribute to it, but you can't own it.
I don't care about their personal beliefs of any one of the contributers. As long as the software works, that's fine. I like rocketry, but the nazis contributed a lot to that. It doesn't matter though. It doesn't change the function of it.
You sound like communist
Yeah, I would mostly agree with that. More of an anarchist bent, but sure. I'm not a tanky. I have no issue with communism, but I do have an issue with authoritarianism, especially authoritarianism that uses the name communism as a cover while not protecting worker rights and freedoms.
You sound like you're implying that because they made significant technical contributions to useful software, then that automatically validates their political beliefs, and /u/[email protected] should just put up with it.
Lemmy is social media. It's entertainment. Maybe there's a time and place to "put up with" genocide-deniers, but I don't fault anyone for not wanting to deal with that all the time.
Sure, and the software is pretty good. Nazi rockets were also good. It doesn't mean anything else is good or valid about them. I don't care if the creator is a tanky (definitely don't care if they're a communist) to enjoy the software. It is a useless point to say they created it as a way to justify anything else being good.
It's an appeal to false authority and therefore unrelated to the conversation.
And? They don't run anything but their own instances.
Its FOSS. they don't have any ownership over the platform as a whole. If they started trying to fuck with the lemmy source code for their own agenda, then we'd just fork it and carry on as before
No not at all. The core contributors of lemmy just happen to be communist
They've been real quiet since that probe dropped 😂
There is nothing communistic in Rogozin
Isn't Lemmygrad defederated from this instance
Could be. They aren't on my home instance. I've seen several threads about this and literally none of them, as far as I could see, had any comments from them.
LMAOOOOOO
Seems like russian science is as shit as russian military
Well then they just send 1000 probes and I'm sure one will work eventually
The quality of Russian science is irrelevant when 99% of funding goes into building new palaces and buying yachts.
Don't forget about brain drain.
The majority of Russians with any braincells (or money) have already left the country.
Yeah, brain drain is real. Every Russian I know from IT sphere has left. Many left after 2014 , everyone else left in 2022. Every person with a brain doesn't want to associate with the regime in any way and doesn't want to suffer.
It's roskosmos being roskosmos. I'm surprised it didn't explode mid-air.
Roskosmos is usually pretty competent.
I mean, they helped build the ISS (and a lot more) and have sent a lot people up there for YEARS without any fatalities.
^^^and ^^^no ^^^I ^^^dont't ^^^like ^^^Russia.
Engieneers are mostly competent(even with salary of about 50k ₽/mo or 550$/mo), but managment... Incompetent managmemt is best you can hope, because Rogozin is much worse.
Production and quality control is so terrible that "accidentaly" much cheaper solder may be used, that later will cause A HOLE in ISS.
Also this particular mission was rushed. "Won't be ready for another year? Launch now!"
Ah, the EA strategy, a true classic!
You are never going to have competetent management when they're forced to follow unrealistic goals due to political reasons.
They call it a successful missile strike on the moon and they're back to winning again.
The Lunar War over minerals is going to be so fucking stupid and fun.
There probably isn't a worse war in terms of property damage per money spent to damage it you could come up with. Setting up a system of mining minerals, sending it back to earth, and making money on the process is going to be the biggest megaproject you can imagine. All of it very easy to break.
"Today, Russian engineers managed a perfect example of Lithobreaking on the moon, showing the superiority of Soviet cosmonautics." -- Russian News Outlets
No no no, the moon illegally and meanly crashed into innocent Russia’s poor little defenseless space robot without any provocation!
Robot Fedor)))))))
What, invading Ukraine wasn't enough and now they need to pollute the moon with their piece of shit spacecraft too?
Fuck Putin, fuck Russia, etc, etc.
Slava Ukraini!
Must've been a Ukrainian
hospitalmilitary base there.Last attempt to pass on the knowledge before the Luna 24 people are gone - it landed 18 August 1976.
Do you know the background for this? What do they want to achieve now that they didn't in '76?
I get that it's a space race between Russia and India, but surely there must be more to it. Is it just the prestige of landing on the south pole?
This was just to make headlines and demonstrate the greatness of glorious Mother Russia. Unsurprisingly it didn't quite work out like that.
My unsubstantiated speculation is that it's because of exactly what who you're replying to said. It's been a number of years since roscosmos has had a successful mission to another celestial body, so I think this was supposed to be a verification that they still had this capability to enable a lunar base program (as another reply mentioned).
Yes, it seems likely this is an element as well - and if that's the motivation performing an uncontrolled landing must sting a bit extra, even if they were aiming to pull off something more challenging than in '76.
Not really a race (media just likes to frame it that way)
Main goal is prospecting for potential base locations, because the poles have the best chances of finding easily accessible water ice.
And yeah, prestige too, because landing from polar orbit is more difficult.
Holy shit - somehow I had either missed or forgotten that they found ice on the moon.
That explains it, thanks!!
Why is it harder to land in the poles? I’m not doubting you, just curious
Mainly, because the poles are always just barely within line of sight to Earth (and thus line of communications) if at all. So the probe has to either operate autonomously or you have to maintain coms via a relay satellite. Either isn't exactly easy with hardware that must also be radiation-hardened and lightweight. Initiating the deorbit burn should (I am guessing this) be done from the backside or you'll run into even more problems when you overshoot the landing site.
Thanks for sharing. That all makes sense.
There was a lot of development in those almost 50 years. I guess the instruments are better, the drilling equipment better...
IIRC Luna 24 found some traces of water, and poles are often prime suspects to find water in higher quantities ...
I'm impressed they managed to hit it
Sad, hope chandrayaan makes it.
In Soviet Russia, Moon land on you.
Noo, not a Russia!
Somebody better break the news to Hexbear; they were really close.
In Soviet Russia, moon land on YOU!
Oh great. We're going to start destroying the moon now too?
It's a rock with no air and no life. How can we hurt it?
Yeah between all the other alternatives I think strip mining the moon is pretty OK. It's not as good as doing nothing - but I'd rather do it on a body with no ecosphere instead of destroying habitats
Why is it not as good as doing nothing? What benefit is there to not doing it? I mean, I could get surface preservation and keeping the moon pretty for the sake of humanity... But it sounds like there's any inherent value in not doing it?
You know those pictures taken from the Moon of the Earth? The ones where you can barely make out big islands like Cuba?
No one on the Earth will know anything is going on up there unless they have a very powerful telescope.
Yeah, that's true. We would be talking about terraforming projects on an enormous scale, unlike anything we've seen before.
What I'm saying is just that, if it came to that, I can understand wanting to preserve the surface of the moon, for sentimental and/or historical, human reasons, even though preserving the surface also doesn't provide any real, practical benefit.
I'm not arguing we shouldn't, but the "ideal" scenario with any natural resource is always to preserve it in my book
But this is certainly a case imo where the upsides would outweigh the downsides
Why? I can point out reason why preserving some wetlands is a good thing by pointing to plants and animals and humans. Something is only good because something benefits from it. Nothing is intrinsically good or bad.
It is a dead lifeless airless rock in space. Who suffers if a billionth of a percent of it is used for something?
I think you're entirely misunderstanding my meaning and sentiment, given that I don't disagree with anything in your comment
You need to read more science fiction.
Lucifer's Hammer or Seven Eves might be in order :)
I have read both. In 'Seveneves' the Moon breaks apart for no known reason and in 'Lucifer's Hammer' it's not the Moon that impacts the Earth.
are you saying we can't find a way to ruin that thing for future life.. hold my lunar module, son..
WTF is 'future life?'
No air, no water, either blasted by unfiltered sunlight or near absolute zero. It's a lifeless rock.
okay how about this.. we develop terraforming tech in the near future, but something we're doing to the surface water there now (for example), spoils this process forever on our own Moon.. because WE weren't careful and polluted the environment for them.. i think that sounds like something we could accomplish..
The 'water' on the Moon is ice buried below the surface.
There is nothing up there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
i'm gonna write that down alright.. you're very helpful..
It's the moon. There is no life there.
"Is ok. We send conscript next time to fly. No more crashes!"
Does this mean the moon really exists?
gravity 1/6 karma 1/1
I was expecting this to happen, especially after watching Scott Manley's video on it earlier this week.
The mighty bear soviet hightech 🤣🤣 How could be this loser country considered as a major power? Ok their "special military action" in ukraine showed they are a joke, but how?
Btw there will be some engineers, who need to learn flying...
It'd be breaking news if they actually managed to land it successfully.
Russiya, you is drunk. No drive da spacecraft!
So... They were kinda low-key racing India weren't they? Does this count? Did they win the race? I'm just glad it was unmanned
Not really. That probe was scheduled to go up 10 years ago - with collaboration from India. It's more a case of India going "F that, we're doing it ourselves now" - And russia lagging behind so much, they actually got lapped.
India knew is was a clusterfuck from the beginning. They didn't want to be associated with that junk.
I do find it hard to justify why we give India aid money when they have a space program.
What exactly is hard about it?
Anyone in the country's space programme should honestly stay away from any windows or staircases right now.
Well that's unfortunate. I bet the public would've loved to hear a success story for once
Oh, I'm sure they hear plenty of those. Just not, y'know, based on a lot of actual success.
Well so far they have been doing these missions once in a decade and none of them succeeded. So see you in another 10 years I guess.
That's a very depressing outlook to have on everything for no real reason honestly.
It's not outlook, it's reality. Russian leadership doesn't have the will or incentive to expend billions launching dozens of missions to perfect the technology and learn from their mistakes like USSR did back in 60s (in fact USSR was launching them several times a year and there were many more Lunar missions them than official "24" number. Failures were simply not reported to the public like now).
They wanted a quick way to somewhat repair Russian patriots' pride in their country by reminding them that Russia was "first in space" and so they are superior to the filthy westerners. That failed so they will just instruct propaganda machine to distract people with something else (plenty of that around) and move on.
In a decade or so there will be some other political cause to remember about space exploration and next mission will be funded. Of course there is no way to for engineers to learn from their mistakes and accumulate the necessary experience when it's done this way.
It is what it is. Roscosmos has been dysfunctional for decades. Science mixed with politics, low budget, high political pressure, low quality testing ... all resulting in this. It's just rotten.
LMAO.
Let the race to mom pollution begin!
Welp,, no choice but to leave the typo there! Thank you autocorrect!
You leave mom out of this