Russia revisits its Soviet space heritage for a new series of missions to which it will return theyoon.
The first of the missions, called Luna 25, is expected to begin in October and end a 45-year drought of Russian lunar landings with the country’s first arrival at the South Pole, where Russian scientists, like everyone else, are focused on the moon. study water locked below the surface in permanent ice.
“The moon is at the heart of our program for the next decade,” Lev Zelenyi, a scientific adviser to the Russian Institute of Spatial Research, said during a virtual presentation on March 23 hosted by the National Academy of Sciences.
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Russia has a lot of company to set up ambitious lunar reconnaissance programs. The United States directs human reconnaissance with its Artemis program, which also contains many robot moon transmissions. In December, China ate the first fresh food moon monsters to earth in decades in an ever-unfolding series of missions called Chang’e. In the and Israel both promised successor spacecraft after their lunar landers – called Chandrayaan-2 and Beresheet, respectively – crashed into the moon in 2019.
But only the US can match Russia’s lunar legacy, which Russia is consciously using by picking up the name and summary of the Luna series from where they stopped in 1976. “We want to show some consistency,” Zelenyi said.
Therefore, Luna 25. The lander launched in October is designed to study ice that is permanently frozen below the lunar surface, which prospective explorers hope to use as a source, and to avoid the dangers of sharp fragments of moon dust. While landing, the spacecraft will use a camera from Europe to promote the European Space Agency’s future lunar missions.
But Luna 25 is just the beginning, Zelenyi stressed, walking through a total of five lunar missions in different planning phases. In 2023 or 2024, Russia plans to launch Luna 26, this time an orbit that will search for magnetic and gravitational aberrations in the moon and can capture high-precision images of potential landing sites.
Then, in 2025, with Luna 27, which Zelenyi called ‘I think the most important’, it would be back to the surface. Just like the lander arriving this year, Luna 27 will be the moon south pole and carries European landing software. But also on the robot, the European Space Agency will be a first: a drill that can collect south pole moon rock without melting compounds like water ice in the material.
In addition, the lander will carry a range of tools designed to investigate how the sonwind, a constant stream of charged particles flowing out of the sun and across the solar system affects the lunar surface.
The last two missions in the Luna series as described by Zelenyi do not yet have launch dates. But Luna 28, also known as Luna-Grunt, would directly build on its predecessor by bringing back cryogenically stored monsters from the lunar south pole that would retain water ice and other so-called volatile compounds.
“This is a sample return, but a different sample return than what was done earlier,” Zelenyi said. ‘It will be … not just regolith [lunar dirt] but all volatile and cryogenic inclusions to it, which are technically challenging. ‘
Eventually, Luna 29 would transport a new Lunokhod rover, which would return to Soviet missions. Lunokhod-1 became the first successful rover in another world in 1970 and explored the Mare Imbrium region, or the Sea of Rains, for ten months.
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