Russian space agency Roscosmos said Saturday that its Luna-25 came across an abnormality after a command was sent for entering pre-landing orbit however it “could not maneuver in accordance with the required parameters”.
“Today, in accordance with the flight program of the Luna-25 probe, at 2:10pm. Moscow time, a command was issued to the probe to enter the pre-landing orbit,” the Russian space agency said.
“During the operation, an emergency occurred on the space probe that did not allow it to perform the maneuver in accordance with the required parameters,” Roscosmos said.
Russian media TASS reported that scientists of the command and control team started to analyse the situation after receiving data from Luna-25 which entered the moon’s orbit on August 16 — becoming the first Russian spacecraft to do so since 1976.
The Russian probe is scheduled to land on the south pole of the moon Monday as part of a race by superpowers to explore the area of the moon which, according to scientists may hold frozen water and precious elements that could host life.
Earlier, Roskosmos stated that it had acquired the first results from the Luna-25 mission and that they were being analysed.
The agency also posted images of the moon’s Zeeman crater taken from the spacecraft. The crater is the third deepest in the moon’s southern hemisphere, it said, measuring 190 km (118 miles) in diameter and eight km (five miles) in depth.
Roskosmos said data it had received so far had provided information about the chemical elements in the lunar soil and would also facilitate the operation of devices designed to study the near-surface of the moon.
It added that its equipment had registered “the event of a micrometeorite impact”.
Roughly the size of a small car, it aims to operate for a year on the south pole, where scientists at Nasa and other space agencies in recent years have detected traces of frozen water in the craters.
The presence of water has implications for major space powers, potentially allowing longer human sojourns on the moon that would enable the mining of lunar resources.