The Moon will be Earth’s seventh continent, the only one whose riches and resources have yet to be conquered and exploited. This idea, formulated more than half a century ago in the Soviet Union (the Russians consider Eurasia as a single continent), was revived with the imminent arrival of the first missions at the satellite’s South Pole. Here the space powers compete for the new lunar gold: water.
Russia had planned that its Luna 25 probe, the first to take that country to the moon in more than 40 years, would land between August 21 and 24. India’s Chandrayaan-3 will land on the moon on the 23rd or 24th. The two countries will fight for first place in a few days or even hours.
“We hope to arrive on the 21st,” Yuri Borisov, head of Russia’s space agency, said in a statement reported by Portal. Landing on the pole is completely automatic and depends largely on the probe reaching the predetermined zone, which is not very abrupt. “I am confident that we will land smoothly and accurately and be the first to arrive,” Borisov added.
The main advantage of Russia is that its ship is ready to last a year or more at the enemy’s South Pole. The ship remains fixed at its landing point north of Bogulawsky Crater, 97 kilometers in diameter, where there is a high probability of finding water.
“If there is frozen water in the upper layer of the lunar surface near the landing site, the scientific instruments onboard Luna-25 can detect it,” said Olga Zakutniaya, spokeswoman for the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI). EL PAÍS., responsible for the scientific part of the mission. “However,” he continues, “even in its polar regions, our satellite is a very dry place compared to Earth.” The Russian LEND instrument on board [la sonda orbital] NASA’s LRO has shown that the water content in the upper layer of the surface does not exceed 5% by weight down to a depth of one meter, but only in the most water-rich regions. The average grade is lower and the regions with the greatest water resources are unevenly distributed.” This poses major future challenges for using this water to produce hydrogen for fuel, oxygen to breathe and water.
Should Luna-25 make a successful landing, experiments would begin immediately, but results would take between four and six months, Zakutniaya explains. The ship must hibernate during the cold moonlit nights, which last a little over 14 Earth days. These results will also provide another piece of important information. “Moon dust is extremely harmful to both robotic probes and future astronauts, so we will use the data from this mission to develop plans to combat its effects,” said the IKI spokesman. Russia plans to send successive robotic missions to the South Pole laying the groundwork for the arrival of cosmonauts, a project not yet approved by the Putin administration.
Image of the moon taken by the Chandrayaan-3.ISRO spacecraft
India can be viewed as David fighting the Eurasian Goliath. Its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft has fewer scientific instruments and will only operate until sunset after the first lunar day. Unlike Russia, which has already managed to land robotic ships on the satellite, India is recovering from the failure of Vikram, a lander that traveled aboard the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter in 2019 and failed to land successfully. Indian Space Exploration Agency (ISRO) officials say they have learned from their mistakes and hope this time the spacecraft can land successfully at a speed similar to walking. His great advantage is that he is on board the Pragyan (wisdom in Sanskrit), a small mobile vehicle that allows him to explore the environment near the South Pole landing point and analyze the composition of the soil and rocks.
The Indian Space Agency says that six orbital probes are already deployed on the moon and two more are abandoned, and that Chandrayaan-2 has already had to perform three maneuvers to avoid collisions with other ships. The Indians hope that the more ships there are on the moon, both public and private, the more urgent the need for coordination to avoid “risks.”
While Russia and India compete to be the first to land at the pole, Japan will be racing with the Slim mission, a small spacecraft project of the Japan Space Agency, scheduled for launch on August 26. In this case, your goal is to land far from the pole, in the equatorial zones of the satellite.
The culmination of this lunar gold rush will be the landing of the United States and its allies. This week, NASA chief Bill Nelson held a press conference apparently aimed at counter-planning the launch of Russia’s Luna 25 mission, which was successfully completed on Friday. His main message was that the data from the manned Artemis 2 and 3 missions are still fully valid, although the rocket on one of those missions, SpaceX’s spacecraft, exploded on its first test. Artemis 2 will embark on a moon flyby in late 2024 with three Americans and one Canadian. The next, scheduled for December 2025, will see the first non-white woman and man set foot on the surface of the South Pole, 50 years after the first manned missions to the satellite.
Nelson emphasizes that there is a space race, but its competitor is not Russia or India, but China. “I don’t want China to reach the South Pole ahead of us and say, ‘This is ours, don’t come here,'” the former congressman said. Through the Artemis Accords, the United States establishes itself as the world arbiter, overseeing that the moon’s resources are accessible to all signatories, currently 28 countries including Spain. Despite the Ukraine war and his distance from the Putin regime, Nelson surprisingly supported Russia. “We wish them the best of luck,” he said of Luna-25.
In 2024, NASA also hopes to launch several robotic missions, including a mobile exploration rover, that will pave the way for astronauts and their Artemis base camp, the first human settlement at the moon’s south pole. From here, the astronauts will first explore the environment for several days, later for weeks, with various mission-conditioned vehicles. It will be the start of public-private projects to be developed in this decade that will begin exploiting water and minerals on the moon. Lunar surface and orbital bases will serve as rehearsal sites for future missions to Mars, with the one-way trip taking a year.
Veteran Russian scientist Mikhail Marov, a specialist in solar system exploration, recently put forward an admirable idea, albeit one that deviates somewhat from the current geopolitical climate. “112 years ago, in 1911, exploration of the South Pole of the Earth began,” he wrote in a special issue of the Astronomical Bulletin devoted to Luna-25. “Half a century later, Antarctica is home to several thousand people from nearly 30 countries who constantly conduct large-scale scientific research there. In modern times, the beginning of the development of the south pole of the moon could become an analogue of this process.
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