MOSCOW, August 21 The main reason for the crash of Luna-25 is the abnormal operation of the corrective engine, said the head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, on the air of the Rossiya 24 TV channel. According to him, when the station tried to go into a pre-landing orbit, the engine worked about one and a half times longer than expected.
“Unfortunately, the engine shutdown did not occur normally, in accordance with the sequence diagram, but according to a time cutoff, and instead of the planned 84 seconds, it worked for 127 seconds. This was the main cause of the device’s accident,” said the head of the state corporation.
As stated, the entire experiment was carried out in a zone of stable radio communication, the specialists knew «everything about the position of the ship.» Attempts to restore contact were unsuccessful. Preliminary ballistic calculations showed that due to the abnormal operation of the corrective propulsion system, the device switched to an open lunar orbit and, in fact, crashed into the surface of the Moon,” added Borisov.
Members of a specially created emergency commission are already trying to find out what exactly led to the emergency situation. years, practically lost»: «the change of generations was interrupted». At the same time, Borisov is sure that the lunar program should not be curtailed.
«One of, by the way, the achievements of this mission, albeit not completed, is the formation of a new team at NPO Lavochkin, which, of course, will take into account all the necessary mistakes that were made during this mission, and I hope that the future missions of Luna-26″ , Luna-27 and Luna-28 will already be successful,» he concluded.
The first domestic lunar station in almost 50 years was created at the S.A. Lavochkin Research and Production Association. On August 11, the Soyuz 2.1b rocket with the Fregat upper stage and the Luna-25 installed on it launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome. A few minutes later, the Fregat entered the Earth's orbit, and an hour and 20 minutes after launch, it sent the station on a flight trajectory to the Moon.
During the flight, the station corrected the trajectory twice, and on August 16, after two braking impulses entered the orbit of the moon with a height of about 100 kilometers. During the flight, the station transmitted data from scientific instruments to Earth, as well as several photographs, including a photograph of the Zeeman crater at the south pole of the Moon.
It was assumed that on August 21 the station would land on the Moon north of the Boguslavsky crater on the visible side. The main goal of the mission was to study the soil of the Earth's natural satellite for the presence of ice.