MOSCOW, September 11 The cause of the crash of the Luna-25 interplanetary station may be a malfunction of the Bius-L instrument for measuring orientation and acceleration, which had not been tested before in space, the source said.
“Yes, it can,” answered the agency’s interlocutor when asked whether the cause of the Luna-25 accident could be a malfunction of the device.
According to him, the device is designed to determine the orientation of the space station and determine the flight speed. He transmits this data to the station computer, and it issues a command to the engine.
The interlocutor especially noted that the main sign of the reliability of any device is its flight testing. “Between a new device and a proven device, it is always better to choose the second option,” he said. However, «Bius-L» was not tested in space.
The source emphasized that a failure in the operation of the navigation device is only one of the versions; the final decision will be made by the emergency commission.
The Bius-L inertial block was developed by the Research and Production Center for Automation and Instrumentation named after Academician N. A. Pilyugin (NPTsAP). The device is designed to determine the orientation and acceleration of a spacecraft using fiber-optic gyroscopes and an accelerometer.
«Bius-L» is made entirely from Russian components, including electronics. The head of the Moscow Department of Investment and Industrial Policy, Vladislav Ovchinsky, previously noted that the developers had the task of creating a completely Russian device “in the shortest possible time.”
The Soyuz 2.1b rocket with the first domestic lunar station in almost 50 years launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome at 02.11 Moscow time on August 11. On August 16, the device entered lunar orbit. The transfer to the pre-landing orbit was expected on August 19, and the soft landing on the South Pole of the Moon was expected on August 21. Roscosmos reported on August 19 that an emergency situation occurred on board the station, which did not allow the transition to the pre-landing orbit with the specified parameters. The next day, the state corporation reported that Luna-25 switched to an off-design orbit, collided with the Moon and ceased to exist.
Later, the head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, named the cause of the emergency — the engine of Luna-25, when trying to switch to a pre-drop orbit, worked for 127 seconds instead of 84, and the device “crashed” into the Earth’s satellite. He also said that the emergency commission for Luna-25 has already been appointed and has begun work, it will have to figure out in detail what led to the abnormal operation of the correction engine, and will receive results in the near future.