Russia's Moon Rocket Plan Goes Kaboom

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Today’s Highlights:

• 🌑Russia’s Moon Rocket Plan Goes Kaboom🚀

• 💰Autonomous AI Agents Startup Dropzone AI Raises $3.5M💸

Russia’s Bold Attempt to Conquer the Moon’s South Pole Cut Short

Launching a spacecraft and having it safely land on the moon has been a dream many countries have wanted to achieve for as long as we can remember. Though America was the first country to have astronauts walk on the moon in 1969 with Apollo 11, the Soviet Union (USSR) was the first to have an unmanned aircraft to explore the moon in 1959 with Luna 2.

More missions to the moon have been conducted by several countries since then, like Japan, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Italy, and the USSR, which has had 16 successful lunar missions.

Recently, Russia launched the spacecraft Luna-25, which the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has, unfortunately, confirmed to have crashed into the moon.

Luna Programme

The very first spacecraft launched by The Soviet Union as part of the Luna program, the Luna-1, missed its intended impact with the moon in January 1959. Following this, The Soviet Union continuously launched various spacecraft, from impactors, flybys, soft landers, orbiters, and rovers, to sample returns.

The Luna 25, also called the Luna-Glob-Lander, is the first spacecraft Russia has tried sending to the moon since the Luna-24, a sample return craft that returned to Earth on August 22, 1976. After 47 years, Russia scheduled the spacecraft to land on the moon on Monday, August 21, 2023, but abnormal situations ended the mission in failure.

Crash Landing

The director general of Roscosmos, Yury Borisov, stated that the Luna-25’s engines were turned on over the weekend to enter a “pre-landing orbit,” but the spacecraft didn’t shut down properly and plunged onto the moon instead. Roscomos lost touch with Luna 25 around 2:57 p.m. Moscow time and has revealed that according to a “preliminary analysis,” the Luna-25 had switched to an uncontrolled, off-design orbit right before the collision.

Russian state television broadcasted the failed mission for about 26 seconds before shutting down the program.

It was not immediately clear as to what caused the crash, but Roscosmos disclosed that the unfortunate incident occurred due to an issue onboard the automatic station, which disallowed the maneuver to be performed with the originally specified parameters. A formed commission will continue to investigate more specific reasons behind the crash.

Luna 25

The pilotless 1.8 tonnes spacecraft’s objective was to become the first spacecraft to land on the moon’s south pole, a part of the moon that scientists believe to have precious elements and reserves of frozen water in craters shielded from the sun.

It is speculated that the frozen water could be transformed into air and rocket fuel. Discovering large bodies of water on the moon has also been long believed to be a sign that human ecosystems could potentially be situated on the moon someday.

Luna 25 was equipped with eight specialized scientific instruments, all crucial to the initial mission, but most important was the spectrometers, which were intended to study the composition of the moon’s soil, detect surface water, and investigate the extremely thin lunar exosphere for one year.

Borisov apparently has reason to believe that the Luna 25’s failure was caused by the USSR’s decision to stop pursuing space flight for almost 50 years and that stopping now would be a grave decision.

From launching the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957 to claiming that its cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to enter space in 1961, there is no doubt that Russia would want to maintain a great reputation for space flight, meaning more mission attempts may be expected soon enough.

Funding News

Autonomous AI Agents Startup Dropzone AI Raises $3.5M

Seattle-based startup Dropzone AI is known for its autonomous AI security agent platform. The platform automates the wearying, monotonous, and time-consuming work usually required to investigate security alerts.

By utilizing large language models, human analysts can focus on major security threats and higher-value work, leaving the AI agents to perform end-to-end investigations that can be considered busy work but would still require elite analyst skills. The AI agents can process and investigate every security alert and produce detailed reports as well as solution recommendations for human analysts.

According to Dropzone AI CEO and founder Edward Wu, humans can no longer keep up with security threats in our digitalized society without automated assistance. With the help of LLMs, defensive forces against cybersecurity menaces can only become stronger and better, and the sooner companies realize this, the better.

The startup had recently secured a $3.5 million seed round led by Decibel Partners and will focus on improving its technology to further assist security teams in dealing with cyberattacks that continuously add up every day, in both quantity and complexity.

Pioneer Square Ventures Fund, Pangea Security CEO Oliver Friedrichs, Duo Security co-founder Jon Oberheide, and ExtraHop CTO Jesse Rothstein also took part in the funding round.

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