The Booty Report

Arr, NASA be spyin' on the moon, findin' where them Russians be crashin' their Luna 25!

2023-09-01

Arr, ye scurvy dogs from NASA be showin' us pictures of a blasted crater, claimin' 'tis the very spot where a Russian landlubber's contraption met its watery end on the moon's surface. Aye, 'tis a grand spectacle indeed!

NASA has announced that it has captured images of the moon, revealing the "likely" impact site of Russia's unsuccessful Luna 25 mission. The lunar lander crashed on August 19, bringing an end to Russia's first lunar mission in nearly fifty years. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft captured pictures of a new crater on the moon's surface, believed to be the impact site of the Luna 25 mission. Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, published an estimate of the impact location on August 21. The LRO team was able to design and send commands to capture images of the site, comparing them to previous images taken prior to the impact. The new crater, approximately 30 feet wide, was formed after the LRO's most recent image of the area in June 2022. NASA concluded that the close proximity of the crater to the estimated impact point suggests it is from the Luna 25 mission rather than a natural occurrence.

Roscosmos stated that the spacecraft encountered a problem while attempting to enter a pre-landing orbit, resulting in an unpredictable orbit and ultimately crashing into the moon's surface. A commission has been established to investigate the cause of the failure. While the primary goal of the Luna 25 mission was to search for frozen water on the lunar surface, its significance for the Russian government lay in the political competition between superpowers, particularly China and the USA. Russia, along with other nations, sought to claim the title of space superpower. The Luna-25 mission aimed to achieve the first-ever landing at the moon's south pole, a region where scientists have long speculated the existence of frozen water.

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