Here's a closeup of the Luna 25 impact site. All these impacts from orbit show a faint downrange ejecta fan, not the roughly symmetrical bright ejecta expected for a natural hypervelocity impact. One very important factor here is LRO which has imaged basically the entire surface of the Moon multiple times, so there is pretty much always going to be a pre-impact image, often with similar lighting.
Tomorrow - a quick look ahead to Russia's future lunar plans.
Here we zoom in on the Luna 25 impact site. The location was shown in the context map yesterday. How do we know this is the impact site? Here is the LRO camera page on it:
https://lroc.im-ldi.com/images/1311
The location was predicted by mathematicians at the Keldysh Institute, and 2 km away is a small crater with a south-facing spray of ejecta which was not there 2 years earlier. It's what we expect, close to where we expect, so very likely to be the impact.
#maps #moon #luna25
During the descent to the surface, the Russian spacecraft Luna 25 experienced an anomaly that caused it to impact into the southwest rim of Pontecoulant G crater on 19 August 2023 11:58 am UTC (14:58 Moscow time). Image is 1100 meters wide, north is up, LROC NAC M1447547309R [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].
This map shows the crater Zeeman, location of the only images known to have been taken from orbit. Surface composition was measured by one instrument but I have not located the observation site yet. A dust detector collected data in orbit 2 days before the crash. So there was some small science return from the mission.
At last we get to Luna 25 itself. It would have been an interesting mission. Here is the NSSDCA page for it:
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=2023-118A
A robotic arm would collect a sample from a small workspace close to the lander and deliver it to the lander for analysis. This would be repeated once a month for a year. But it was not to be. Flight control issues caused a braking overburn which caused a crash northeast of the target site. This map puts it into context.
🇮🇳 #India’s budgetary allocation for its space programme is $1.55bn - #NASA’s budget for the year is $25bn 💰. India spent $74m on the #Mars 🔴 orbiter #Mangalyaan and $75m on #Chandrayaan3. NASA’s #Maven orbiter had cost $582m 💰 and Russia’s #Luna25 $133m. #ISRO employs far fewer people and pays lower salaries, which makes Indian projects competitive 💪 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9xlgnnpzvo
Phil Stooke
Petri Kajander
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