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    From a425couple@21:1/5 to All on Mon Aug 21 18:43:14 2023
    XPost: alt.astronomy

    (Also describes the recent failures of Israeli, India, and Japan.
    Easy to fail, because this is HARD stuff.)

    from https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/08/20/russias-bid-to-return-to-the-moon-comes-to-an-ignominious-end

    Russia’s bid to return to the Moon comes to an ignominious end
    All eyes now turn to India


    image: afp
    Aug 20th 2023

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    Arash of small, fresh craters across the lunar surface testifies to the international rush to return to the Moon by means of robot spacecraft.
    In April 2019 the gyroscopes on Beresheet, built by a public-private
    Israeli partnership, failed during the craft’s descent towards a patch
    of Mare Serenitatis, causing it to crash. In September that year
    Chandrayaan-2, a mission by the Indian space agency, isro, departed from trajectory towards its landing site, not far from the Moon’s south pole.
    The result was what isro’s chief called “a hard landing”—one sufficiently hard for the probe to have never been heard from again.
    This April a mission by ispace, a Japanese company, ended shortly after
    the hakuto-r spacecraft decided that it had reached the surface of Mare Frigoris while still 5km above it, and turned off its engines. The
    Moon’s gravity is weaker than the Earth’s, but not by so much that a spacecraft can weather a fall from that distance.

    On the morning of August 20th Russia announced that it had joined the
    ranks of the new crater-makers. Its Luna 25 mission, launched on August
    11th, entered orbit around the Moon on August 16th. It was due to
    undertake its landing five days later. But on August 19th, just after
    its controllers had told it to adjust its orbit in preparation, contact
    with the probe was lost. On the morning of August 20th Roscosmos, the
    Russian space agency, announced that “a deviation between the actual and calculated parameters of the propulsion manoeuvre led the Luna 25
    spacecraft to enter an undesignated orbit and it ceased to exist
    following a collision with the surface of the Moon”.

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