Russia made final preparations on Thursday for the launch of its first lunar spacecraft in 47 years, as it seeks to become the first country to soft-land on the moon’s south pole, which may harbor vast deposits of water ice.
Astronomers have wondered about water on the Moon, which is 100 times drier than the Sahara Desert, for centuries. NASA’s 2018 map showed water ice in the shadow of the moon, and in 2020 NASA confirmed the presence of water in the sun.
The Soyuz 2.1v rocket carrying the Luna-25 spacecraft will blast off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, 3,450 miles (5,550 kilometers) east of Moscow, at 02:11 Moscow time (04:41 a.m. The Russian space agency said the moon landing was on August 23.
Russia’s first lunar mission since 1976 is competing with India, which launched its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander last month, and more broadly, the United States and China, which have advanced lunar exploration programs.
“The last time it happened was in 1976, so there’s a lot of significance to this incident,” Asif Siddiqi, a history professor at Fordham University, told Reuters.
“Russia’s desire for the moon has many different aspects. I think first and foremost, it’s an expression of national power on the global stage.”
American astronaut Neil Armstrong is best known for being the first man to walk on the moon in 1969, but the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 mission was the first spacecraft to reach the lunar surface in 1959, while Luna in 1966 The -9 mission was the first spacecraft to reach the lunar surface. First make a soft landing on the moon.
But Moscow then focused on exploring Mars, having failed to launch a probe beyond Earth orbit since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Luna-25 mission makes a lot of sense, especially as the Kremlin says Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine have failed to cripple the Russian economy.
“Let me put it this way: If Russia wins and the Indian probe succeeds, that’s a really big deal,” Sadic said, pointing to the deterioration of Russia’s space program in recent decades.
moon water?
Major powers including the United States, China, India, Japan and the European Union have explored the moon in recent years, despite Japan’s failed mission to the moon last year and Israel’s mission to the moon in 2019.
No country has soft-landed in Antarctica yet. India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission failed in 2019.
Rugged terrain makes landing there difficult, but the reward for finding water ice there could be historic: the vast amounts of ice could be used to extract fuel and oxygen, as well as drinking water.
“From a scientific point of view, the most important task, simply put, is to land where no one has ever landed before,” said Maxim Litvak, head of the Luna-25 scientific equipment planning team .
“There are signs of ice in the soil in the Luna-25 landing area, which can be seen in the orbital data,” he said, adding that Luna-25 will work on the moon for at least one Earth year, taking samples.
The Russian space agency says the flight to the moon will take five days. The spacecraft will spend five to seven days in lunar orbit before landing at one of three possible touchdown sites near the poles — a timetable that means it could match or narrowly match Indian rivals for landing on the lunar surface.
Chandrayaan-3 will conduct a two-week experiment, while Luna-25 will work on the Moon for a year.
Weighing 1.8 tons and carrying 31 kilograms (68 pounds) of science equipment, Luna-25 will use a scoop to collect rock samples from a depth of 15 centimeters (6 inches) to test for the presence of frozen water. Can support human life.
It can explore the lunar regolith (loose layer of surface material) to a depth of 10 cm, and carries a dust monitor and a wide-field ion energy mass analyzer that measures ion parameters in the lunar exosphere.
Russia has been planning such a mission for decades. Originally scheduled for release in October 2021, it has been delayed by almost two years. The European Space Agency had planned to mount its Pilot-D navigation camera on Luna-25 for testing, but cut ties with the project after Russia invaded Ukraine last February.
Residents of a village in Russia’s far east will be evacuated from their homes at 7:30 a.m. Friday because one of the rocket stages that launched the Luna-25 could crash there, a local official said. “.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
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