NASA has released more images showing what remains of Luna 25, the mission that saw Russia attempt to send a spacecraft back to the moon nearly half a century later: a 10-meter-diameter crater on the moon’s surface, Reuters reports.

Luna 25 crash-landed on the lunar surface on August 19 after operators lost control of the spacecraft during its pre-selenium launch.

“The system moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist after impact with the lunar surface,” Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, announced at the time.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has taken more photos of the area of ​​the lunar surface where the accident occurred, and US officials have concluded that a new crater appeared here as a result of a collision between a Russian probe and the moon.

“The new crater has a diameter of about 10 meters. “Because this new crater is very close to the predicted impact point of Luna 25, the LRO team concludes that it likely formed as a result of this mission rather than a natural impact.”

After the disaster, Moscow announced the creation of an intergovernmental commission to investigate the causes of the crash of its spacecraft.

The Kremlin says that there is nothing wrong with the accident of “Luna-25”.

Although numerous lunar missions have failed, the failure of Luna 25 highlighted the decline of the Russian aerospace industry compared to its Cold War glory days, when Moscow launched the first satellite into orbit in 1957, Sputnik 1, and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first in 1961. the first man to reach space.

The failure was even more painful for Moscow, as a few days later India managed to successfully land a satellite.

However, the Kremlin said that the fall of the probe on the surface of the moon is “nothing terrible” and that the important thing is that the Russian space exploration program continues.

“This is not a reason to despair and pull your hair out. This is another reason to analyze the reasons (of the failure) and eliminate them next time,” Kremlin press secretary Dmytro Peskov told Russian journalists on Tuesday.

Luna-25 was Russia’s first attempt to send a spacecraft to the Moon after a 47-year hiatus.