Russia publishes preliminary investigation results on the cause of the crash of the "Moon-25" probe

CTOnews.com, October 3 (Xinhua)-- Russia launched the Lunar-25 (Luna-25) probe on August 11 this year. This is the first robot mission to the moon since the Soviet Union in 1976, and it is also Russia's third space exploration spacecraft in the post-Soviet era, and this mission and the previous two have failed.

According to previous reports from CTOnews.com, the Russian Lunar-25 probe was scheduled to attempt to land on the moon on August 21, but deviated from its designed orbit and collided with the moon on August 19 because of an emergency that "could not maneuver in accordance with the specified parameters."

The Russian National Aerospace Group announced today that the most likely cause of the Moon-25 crash was that a large number of instructions were sent at the same time, causing the accelerometer of one of the angular velocity measurement units to fail to open, resulting in the abnormal operation of the airborne integrated control system.

To put it simply, these command data should have different priority settings, so that the equipment should give priority to a certain task, and the allocation of different priority instructions has a certain degree of randomness. the failure of the lunar-25 accelerometer to send a signal caused the airborne control system not to shut down the propulsion system in time when the probe reached the predetermined speed, but only after the thruster was running at a specified time.

As reflected in the actual process, when the lunar-25 probe propulsion system changed from a near-lunar circular orbit to a landing elliptical orbit, the engine ignited for 127 seconds instead of the planned 84 seconds, eventually causing it to enter an unscheduled orbit and collide with the moon.

According to the results of the investigation, the Russian National Aerospace Group will make recommendations to avoid such incidents in future missions.