Amid a war with Ukraine and Western countries, Russia will seek to make history by being the first country to successfully land on the South Pole of the Moon, the new promised land of space exploration.
Moscow plans to launch Luna-25 this Friday, a robotic probe that aims to land near Bogulawsky Crater, a depression 97 kilometers across. The moon’s cratered south pole poses enormous difficulties on landing; But it can also harbor extremely valuable ice reserves, likely hidden underground in areas never reached by sunlight due to the satellite’s position.
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The name of this mission is not accidental. Russia is recreating the saga of the Soviet probes that first orbited and landed on the moon in the 1960s and 70s, revealing its hidden face to the United States. In 1976, Luna-24 managed to reach an equatorial zone of the satellite, take soil samples and send them back to our planet; quite an achievement. The problem was that by that time the United States, desperate to win the space race, had already managed to send astronauts to the moon and bring them back laden with lunar rocks.
Half a century later, the world is witnessing a new moon race led by the United States, which aims to bring astronauts to the South Pole within two years. Russia may not be able to match that feat, but with Luna-25 it could be the first nation to land in this uncharted territory and touch the waters of the moon for the first time.
80% chance of success
“We still have the Soviet-era experience and prepared very carefully for this landing,” Lev Zeleny, scientific director of the Russian Space Research Institute, told RT. “I think we’ve addressed the main difficulties and hope the landing will be smooth.” Mission engineers estimate that the mission’s chance of success is at least 80%.
Luna-25 is scheduled to launch Friday aboard a Soyuz 2.1b rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in northeastern Russia. The location was chosen in part to keep everything about this mission within country borders, since it was typically launched from Kazakhstan. It also allows for a more direct trajectory without crossing large inhabited areas. As a precaution, Russia has evacuated 26 residents of the village of Shakhtinskyi, who will be accommodated in a hotel and invited to attend the launch, Portal reports.
Russian Space Agency technicians finalize the details of the Luna 25 module.Roskosmos
The mission is years behind schedule due to ongoing technical difficulties, including the failure of its predecessor Phobos Grunt, a joint Sino-European project to Mars. The war in Ukraine and the Western embargoes were another major stumbling block. Before invading Ukraine, the European Space Agency wanted to contribute a camera to the project, but everything was canceled and Russia has no choice but to go to the moon alone.
The primary landing site – with two other secondary targets in case something goes wrong – was carefully chosen using data from the US orbiting probe LRO. Russians believe that Bogulawsky Crater (named after a Prussian artillery officer involved in the invasion of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars) is one of the points at the pole where there may be more water, a key element for future manned missions. Oxygen and hydrogen can serve as fuel for rockets to one day fly to Mars and beyond. and water can nourish the first human colonies.
Landing on the moon is always a big challenge – only the US, Soviet Russia and China have managed it – because there is no atmosphere to slow you down. Luna-25 has to trust its rockets with everything to slow down and not fall into an abrupt area that causes them to capsize, which happened to some of its predecessors half a century ago. Last April, the Japanese Hakuto-R spacecraft crashed while attempting to land on the moon.
heat with plutonium
On our satellite there are 14.5 Earth days of sunlight and as many at night. Daytime temperatures reach 120 degrees, but when the sun goes down, the temperature at the pole can drop to over 200 degrees below zero. The Russian probe has solar panels for daytime operations and a radioisotope device to generate heat with plutonium at night while it hibernates again until dawn.
The Russian apparatus carries eight scientific instruments. Most colorful is a robotic arm that digs a few centimeters in search of ice, collecting it and analyzing it with various instruments that can detect if there is water, how much, and possibly where it’s coming from. The vehicle is also equipped to search for other interesting elements: thorium, potassium, uranium.
Selected places for landing the probe.Roskosmos
Earth is believed to have collided with Theia, a planet the size of Mars, 4.5 billion years ago. The blow was so brutal that our planet disappeared for a few hours. A small portion was ejected and mixed with the remains of the other body and turned into molten rock. The result was the moon.
Whether the satellite’s water is a holdover from that era or whether it came aboard asteroids and comets that struck both the Moon and Earth with their payloads is a great mystery. “The first excavation of the lunar polar regolith will be a step into the unknown,” emphasize the mission’s scientific leaders in a recent analysis. “Studying macromolecular compounds of cosmic origin conserved in lunar glaciers can unveil the mystery of the origin of life on Earth and allow us to compare biochemical molecular structures on Earth and in space,” they point out.
Luna-25 is the first in a series of missions designed to return Russia to the moon after more than 40 years. “Russia’s lunar program is already planning the next DropShip based on the development of the Luna-25 design,” said Maxim Litvak, one of the mission’s chief scientists. “After Luna-26, an orbital probe, two landing stations will follow. Luna-27 will carry an oil rig [para penetrar metro y medio en el suelo]and Luna-28 will bring Earth from the Moon’s polar region to Earth.
After the launch scheduled for early Friday morning, the Russian spacecraft will need between four and five days to reach the satellite. Once there, it will orbit for a few more days before firing its rockets and beginning its descent toward the South Pole. If all goes well, he won’t win the space race, but he will make history.
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