Mission Summary
Luna 7 came close to the first soft landing on the Moon before failing in the final minutes. Launched October 4, 1965, after an earlier attempt a month before was scrubbed by a faulty sensor, it carried the standard Ye-6 lander capsule and reached the Moon on a near-perfect trajectory.
Unlike its predecessors, Luna 7 carried out its mid-course correction cleanly and approached the Moon on target. Then, just before the braking engine was to fire, the spacecraft abruptly lost attitude control and could not recover. The sensor meant to lock onto Earth had stopped working, leaving the probe unable to orient itself, and its automatic systems blocked the engine from firing.
Without its retro-burn, Luna 7 plunged to the surface and crashed west of the Kepler crater, close to its intended landing site. Investigators later found that the optical sensor of the Yupiter-M astronavigation system had been set at the wrong angle and had lost sight of Earth. It was the tenth consecutive failure in the Ye-6 program.
Sources and notes can be found on the Sources page.
