![]() The last such mission, Luna-24, returned to Earth with lunar soil samples on August 22, 1976. Those bygone successes include the first man-made object to fly by, the first object to crash-land, and finally, in 1966, the first object to land on the moon – all part of the Luna project missions. ![]() The mishap was the latest in a string of embarrassments, failures, and scandals that have plagued Roskosmos over the past decade, highlighting the decline of a storied space industry whose pioneering achievements in the 1950s and 1960s are now distant memories. The mission, Luna-25, failed spectacularly nine days after launch, on August 20, when the craft “ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface,” according to the Russian space agency, Roskosmos. Four days later, the Soviet-built vehicle returned to Earth, carrying a valuable sample of lunar soil, a portion of which Soviet scientists later swapped with colleagues at NASA in the name of international scientific cooperation.Īlmost 47 years later to the day, Russian engineers tried a near-repeat of that feat, seeking to land a craft packed with scientific instruments on the moon’s southern hemisphere, with the goal of spending a year surveying the lunar surface. ![]() On August 18, 1976, a 4-meter-high spacecraft called the Luna-24 touched down on the Mare Crisium, a flat plain in the moon’s northern hemisphere.
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