Russia's failed Luna-25 mission has left a new crater on the moon, NASA satellite images suggest.
Luna-25 was Russia's first moon mission since 1976. But after spinning into an uncontrolled orbit during its descent, the spacecraft crashed into the moon's surface on August 19 and "ceased to exist," according to Russia's space agency Roscosmos.
Images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) suggest that this collision had a lasting impact, in the form of a large crater.
Luna-25 aimed to become the first probe ever to make a controlled landing on the moon's south pole. This region is thought to be rich in water ice that offers exciting prospects for future human outposts and space exploration.
The craft had been racing against India's Chandrayaan-3 to land on the unexplored area. Four days after Luna-25's catastrophic descent, Chandrayaan-3 made history and landed on the moon's south pole.
Two days after the crash, Roscosmos published an estimate of the location of the impact point on the moon's surface. On August 24, the day after Chandrayaan-3's successful landing, NASA sent commands to the LRO to scan the area so they could compare photos from before and after the crash.
Comparing the images side by side, a small new crater, about 33 feet in diameter, had appeared on the moon's surface close to Luna-25's estimated impact point.
NASA's most recent photos of the area before August 2023 were taken in June 2022, so the impact must have happened some time in the last 14 months. With this information, NASA's LRO team concluded that the crater was most likely caused by the spacecraft rather than a natural impactor.
The moon is covered in thousands of craters which form when asteroids, comets or other space debris smash into its surface. The roughly circular shape results from material flying out in all directions from the site of the impact.
The Earth too has been pelted with an array of space rocks throughout its long history but, unlike the moon, it has ways of covering this up, the Lunar and Planetary Institute reports. Weathering and erosion on the Earth's surface has erased all but the most recent terrestrial impacts. But the moon lacks water, an atmosphere and tectonic activity, meaning that almost all of its historical craters are still visible today.
Many of these craters have been mapped by the LRO which was launched in 2009 by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to investigate the surface of our nearest neighbor and answer fundamental questions about its origin and evolution, along with our planet's own.
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Pandora Dewan is a Senior Science Reporter at Newsweek based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on science, health ... Read more
