Russia’s Luna-25 robo-probe has crashed into the moon after controllers at Russian space agency Roscosmos lost control of it, the agency reported on August 20.

Russia launched the probe that was supposed to spend a year gathering data on the moon on August 11, the first moon mission in nearly 50 years and the first domestically made probe in modern Russia’s history.

The unmanned robotic lander went into an “uncontrolled orbit and subsequently crashed”, Roscosmos said.

"The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon," it said in a statement.

Roscosmos said an "abnormal situation" developed that its experts were investigating on August 19, before the probe went out of control. The agency said a preliminary analysis of the Luna 25 mission issue suggests that a deviation between the actual and calculated parameters of the propulsion manoeuvre led to the spacecraft transitioning into an unintended orbit that resulted in a "collision with the lunar surface".  

“On August 19, in accordance with the Luna-25 flight programme, an impulse was provided to form its pre-landing elliptical orbit. At about 14:57 Moscow time, communication with the Luna-25 apparatus was interrupted. The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get in contact with it did not produce any results,” Roscosmos State Space Corporation said on its official Telegram channel.

The mission marked Russia's first mission to the lunar surface since the 1970s. Roscosmos had originally cooperated with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the lunar programme. However, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the ESA ended its work with Moscow and curtailed Russia’s access to international microchips and other technology. The Kremlin boasted before the launch that Luna 25 was the first ever “entirely domestically produced” space probe.

The crash will be a huge embarrassment to the Kremlin, which was using the launch to remind Russians of its former superpower status and was a high profile propaganda event for the Kremlin.

The last time Russia was on the moon was when the Luna 24 probe landed on the surface on August 18, 1976. Russia and the Soviet Union have never landed a cosmonaut on the face of the moon. To date the only country to have walked the surface of the moon is the US.

Russia had anticipated the robot to spend a year gathering samples of rock and dust upon its landing at the moon's south pole. The lunar south pole is of particular interest to scientists, who believe the permanently shadowed polar craters may contain water, which could be a source of air and fuel for future lunar missions. 

The Luna-25 probe was going to study ice formations on the south pole as part of a study into how the moon was formed, the Moscow Planetarium’s scientific director, Faina Rubleva, told TASS.

The probe was supposed to find evidence to answer the question of how the moon was formed: by another planet crashing into the earth about 4bn years ago and breaking off what is now the moon; or if the moon and earth formed independently from a swirly cloud of rocks pulled together by gravity.

Russian scientists favour the second, less popular, theory.

A Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket blasted off from Russia’s newly revamped Vostochny spaceport in the Amur Region in the Russian Far East on August 11 carrying the probe.

The spacecraft was due to spend between three and seven days about 100km above the lunar surface before touching down in the previously unexplored Boguslawsky crater in the south pole region. Ironically, one of the mission’s key goals was to “polish the soft landing techniques”, Roscosmos said before he mission.

Russia intends to send a manned rocket to the moon in 2032-2035 as it restarts its space programme.

Russia has been racing to the Moon's south pole against India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on there next week.

The crash of Luna 25 is the second major failure of Russia’s space programme in modern times. In 2011 Russia tried to send the Phobos-Grunt probe to one of the moons of Mars but the spacecraft did not even fully exit the earth's orbit before falling back into the Pacific Ocean more than two months after launch.