Luna-25, the first Russian mission to the moon since 1976, was launch from the Vostochny spaceport in the Amur Region early Friday morning. Its objective is to make a landing in the southern polar region of the moon by 21st August 2023.
Unlike past missions that land in the equatorial area, Luna-25 is aiming for the challenging southern polar region.
If the landing proves successful, it would make history by arriving two days ahead of India’s Chandrayaan-3, both aiming for their respective first lunar landings in the rugged polar landscape.
An interesting feature of Luna-25 is that it’s the inaugural moon probe built entirely with domestic Russian components in modern times.
The USSR previously conduct 24 official ‘Luna’ missions spanning from September 1958 to August 1976.
Luna-25’s primary objective is to conduct scientific investigations in the moon’s southern polar area.
The probe is equip with instruments design to analyze lunar soil, plasma, and dust for the presence of rare minerals.
The intend landing site is close to the Boguslavsky Crater, and the mission is plan to extend for one year.
According to Roscosmos, the mission’s critical initial phase will span nine minutes, starting from launch and concluding with the separation of the Fregat module (carrying the probe) at the third stage.
The module is expect to fire its main engine twice to set Luna-25 on its trajectory to the moon.
The journey itself is anticipate to last 5 days, with two mid-course corrections.
The final phase, spanning about three days, will place the probe in a circular orbit approximately 100 kilometres above the lunar surface.
During the fourth phase, Luna-25 will transition to an elliptical landing orbit, reaching a minimum altitude of 18 kilometres before conducting a gentle landing in the moon’s southern polar region.
India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission, launch in July, is currently in lunar orbit and is also aiming for a polar landing by 23rd August 2023.
India’s space agency, ISRO congratulated its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos on the successful launch.
Congratulations, Roscosmos on the successful launch of Luna-25 💐
— ISRO (@isro) August 11, 2023
Wonderful to have another meeting point in our space journeys
Wishes for
🇮🇳Chandrayaan-3 &
🇷🇺Luna-25
missions to achieve their goals.
The Soviet Union’s lunar program achieve many historic milestones with the Luna probes.
- Luna 1 was the first spacecraft to exit the Earth-moon system in January 1959.
- In September 1959, Luna 2 became the first human-made object to reach the moon.
- Luna 9 achieve the significant feat of performing a successful soft landing in February 1966
- Luna 10 became the moon’s inaugural artificial satellite that March 1966.
Astronomers have wonder about water on the moon, which is 100 times drier than the Sahara.
NASA maps in 2018 show water ice in the shadow parts of the moon and in 2020 NASA confirm water exists on the sunlight areas.
The Russian lunar mission, the first since 1976, is racing against India which sent up its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander last month and more broadly with the United States and China which both have advance lunar exploration programmes.
US astronaut Neil Armstrong gain renown in 1969 for being the first person to walk on the moon but it was the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 mission which was the first spacecraft to reach the moon’s surface in 1959 and the Luna-9 mission in 1966 was the first to do a soft landing on the moon.
But Moscow then focus on exploring Mars and since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has fail to send probes beyond the earth’s orbit.
There is much riding on the Luna-25 mission, especially as the Kremlin says the West’s sanctions over the Ukraine war have failed to cripple the Russian economy.
Major powers such as the United States, China, India, Japan and the European Union have all been probing the moon over recent years, though a Japanese lunar landing fail in 2022 and an Israeli mission fail in 2019.
No country has yet made a soft landing on the south pole.
An Indian mission, the Chandrayaan-2, fail in 2019.
Rough terrain makes a landing there difficult, but the prize of discovering water ice there could be historic, quantities of ice could be use to extract fuel and oxygen, as well as for drinking water.
Russian space agency Roskosmos said that it would take five days to fly to the moon.
The craft would spend 5-7 days in lunar orbit before descending on one of three possible landing sites near the pole, a timetable that implies it could match or narrowly beat its Indian rival to the moon’s surface.
Chandrayaan-3 is due to run experiments for two weeks, while Luna-25 will work on the moon for a year.
With a mass of 1.8 tons and carrying 31 kg (68 pounds) of scientific equipment, Luna-25 will use a scoop to take rock samples from a depth of up to 15 cm (6 inches) to test for the presence of frozen water that could support human life.
It can explore the moon’s regolith, the layer of loose surface material, to a depth of 10 centimetres and carries a dust monitor and a wide-angle ionic energy-mass analyser that provides measurements of ion parameters in the moon’s exosphere.
Russia has been planning such a mission for decades.
This launch, originally plan for October 2021, has delay for nearly two years.
The European Space Agency had plan to test its Pilot-D navigation camera by attaching it to Luna-25, but broke off its ties to the project after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Residents of a village in Russia’s far east will be evacuate from their homes at 7.30am on Friday because of a “one in a million chance” that one of the rocket stages that launches Luna-25 could fall to earth there, a official said.
Although the US was behind the Soviets in orbital exploration, it claim the first man moon landing with Apollo 11 in July 1969.
The Apollo program conclude in December 1972.
The last Soviet lunar mission, Luna 24, brought lunar soil samples back to Earth for study in August 1976.
