Russia’s first lunar mission in decades ends in failure after crashing into the moon

Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, has not been able to establish contact with the Luna 25 spacecraft after it crashed into the moon’s surface this weekend, making the country’s first lunar mission in decades a failure. 

According to CNN, the incident happened after communication with the robotic spacecraft was interrupted and it was not immediately clear what led to the crash, but a specially formed commission is investigating it. In covering the event, the outlet pulled together insight from experts in the field like Victoria Samson, the Washington office director for Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes the peaceful exploration of outer space, who said, “They were having a lot of problems with quality control, corruption, with funding.” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s former head of science, said in a social media post that no one in the industry “wishes bad onto other explorers. We are reminded that landing on any celestial object is anything but easy & straightforward. Just because others managed to do it decades ago, does not guarantee success today.”

The mission of the Luna 25 spacecraft was to spend one year studying the composition of the moon’s soil, as well as its exosphere.