Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft suffers technical glitch in pre-landing maneuver

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Russia reported an «abnormal situation» Saturday on its moon-bound Luna-25 spacecraft, which launched earlier this month. The country's space agency, Roscosmos, said the spacecraft ran into unspecified trouble while trying to enter a pre-landing orbit, and that its specialists were analyzing the situation. «During the operation, an abnormal situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,» Roscosmos said in a Telegram post.

Roscosmos did not specify whether the incident will prevent Luna-25 from making a landing. The spacecraft is scheduled to land on the south pole of the moon on Monday, racing to land on Earth's satellite ahead of an Indian spacecraft. The lunar south pole is of particular interest to scientists, who believe the permanently shadowed polar craters may contain water.

The frozen water in the rocks could be transformed by future explorers into air and rocket fuel. Also on Saturday, the Russian spacecraft produced its first results. Though Roscosmos said the information was undergoing analysis, the agency reported that the preliminary data obtained contained information about the chemical elements of the lunar soil and that its equipment had registered a «micrometeorite impact.» Roscosmos posted images of the Zeeman crater — the third largest in the moon's southern hemisphere — taken from the spacecraft.

The crater has a diameter of 190 kilometers (118 miles) and is eight kilometers (five miles) deep. The launch from Russia's Vostochny spaceport in the Far East of the Luna-25 craft on Aug. 10 was Russia's first since 1976 when it was part of the Soviet Union.