Russia on Friday launched the Luna-25 spacecraft for the first time in nearly 50 years to fly to the moon. The space device will land at the South Pole later this month and will search for water, among other things. The Soyuz-2.1b launcher took off as scheduled at 9:10 a.m. local time (1:10 a.m. CEST) from the new Vostochny spaceport in the Amur region. The probe entered the cosmos according to plan after a few minutes.
“The launch was successful,” Yuri Borissov, head of Russia’s space agency Roskosmos, said in a live broadcast of the launch. The travel time to the Earth satellite at a distance of about 384,000 kilometers is four and a half days. He hopes for a soft landing on the moon on August 21, because an ideal place to land is first found in orbit around the earth. Everything is going smoothly, said Borisov. This first mission had been postponed several times since 1976 due to technical problems.
Russia wants to build a lunar station
“Luna-25” is part of the Russian lunar program. This aims to build a space station on the celestial body in 2040. Roskosmos thus builds on its Soviet program “Luna”, which it started in 1959. Space probes had also brought lunar rocks to Earth. In fact, the new probe should have been on its way a long time ago. The first planned start date was 2012, the last time May 2022 was targeted.
According to Roscosmos, the 1,800-kilogram Luna-25 spacecraft will help develop technology for soft landings. The probe is also tasked with collecting and analyzing soil samples from the moon. According to the project document, the planned scientific investigations also include studying the surface layers and, in particular, the loose material in the region of the moon’s south pole.
“Luna-25” is to search for water
The Russian probe is mainly intended to determine the water content in the soil. According to Roskosmos, the space researchers expect the proportion of water in the loose material to be negligible because everything evaporates in sunlight and high temperatures. However, under this layer of deposited material (regolith) is permafrost. Scientists expect to find water ice there and in permanently shaded areas.
“Luna-25” is also intended to collect soil samples – and can penetrate up to 40 centimeters deep. Wide-angle cameras photograph the environment and landscapes, the recordings of which can be transmitted via radio transmitters to a research center on Earth.
Space nation in Soviet times
In Soviet times, the proud space nation wrote history several times. The Soviet Union was the first country in space and in 1961 also sent the first human into the cosmos. In 1959, it became the first country in the world to reach the surface of the moon. However, in the race between systems to explore space, the US was the country that succeeded in 1969 with Apollo 11, the first manned lunar mission.
The cooperation with ESA has ended
Roskosmos originally worked with the European space agency ESA on the Russian lunar program. ESA ended cooperation with Moscow after the Russian invasion of Ukraine more than 17 months ago. Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin, who started the war, also wants to show with the current start of the moon mission that the country is still able to carry out its scientific projects despite Western sanctions because of the war. Experts see the moon mission mainly as a means of propaganda.
After the failed attempt (in 2019) to land on the moon four years ago, India also wants to land the probe “Chandrayaan-3” on August 23 or 24. So far, only the US, the Soviet Union and China have managed to make a soft landing.
Source: Krone
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