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Roscosmos chief announces plans to step up work on Luna-26, Luna-27 missions

According to Yury Borisov, despite what happened with the Luna-25 mission, experts managed to gain invaluable experience in flying the spacecraft to the moon

MOSCOW, August 21. /TASS/. Work on the Luna-26 and Luna-27 missions will be stepped up, said Yury Borisov, director general of Russia’s Roscosmos State Space Corporation.

"I hope that the future Luna-26, Luna-27 and Luna-28 missions will prove to be successful," he told the Rossiya-24 TV channel. "I believe that by stepping up work on the Luna-26 and Luna-27 missions, we will receive the results that we unfortunately weren’t able to get from the Luna-25 mission," the Roscosmos chief added.

According to him, it should be recognized that despite what happened, experts managed to gain invaluable experience in flying the spacecraft to the moon, delivering it to circumlunar orbit and carrying out a number of scientific experiments.

Roscosmos reported earlier that according to preliminary calculations, the Luna-25 automatic station had crashed into the moon’s surface and ceased to exist. Earlier, the spacecraft had received an impulse to activate its pre-landing elliptical orbit. About 2:57 p.m. Moscow time on Saturday, communication with the lunar lander was lost.

The Soyuz-2.1b vehicle carrying the Luna-25 autonomous probe was launched from the Vostochny spaceport on August 11. The spacecraft adjusted its flight path twice on August 12 and 14. The unmanned probe entered near-lunar orbit on Wednesday, August 16, and was scheduled to land on the surface of the moon on August 21.

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