Russia revises Soviet space heritage for new series of missions that will take the nation back theirAon.
The first of these missions, called Moon 25, is scheduled to be launched in October, ending a 45-year drought of Russian lunar landings with the nation’s first arrival at the South Pole, where, like everyone else targeting the moon, scientists Russian study water trapped below the surface in permanent ice.
“The moon is at the heart of our program for the next decade,” said Lev Zelenyi, a scientific adviser at the Russian Institute for Space Research, in a March 23 virtual presentation hosted by the National Academy of Sciences.
Monthly timeline: Human explorations of the moon
Russia has a lot of companies in the design of ambitious monthly exploration programs. The United States is aiming at human exploration The Artemis program, which also incorporates a lot of robotic monthly missions. In December, China shipped the first fresh lunar samples on Earth in decades in a series of missions still in progress called Chang’e. India and Israel Both promised successive spacecraft after their monthly landings – nicknamed Chandrayaan-2 and Beresheet, respectively – landed on the moon in 2019.
But only the US can match Russia’s lunar legacy, which Russia consciously uses, taking the name of the Moon series and the enumeration of where remained in 1976. “We want to show some consistency,” Zelenyi said.
Therefore, Moon 25. The Lander, which will be launched in October, is designed to study the frozen ice permanently below the moon’s surface, which potential explorers hope to use as a resource and to assess the dangers posed by sharp lunar dust. As it lands, the spacecraft will use a camera built in Europe to advance the future monthly missions of the European Space Agency.
But Moon 25 is just the beginning, Zelenyi pointed out, completing a total of five monthly missions at various stages of planning. In 2023 or 2024, Russia plans to launch Moon 26, this time an orbiter looking for magnetic and gravitational anomalies in the moon and capturing high-precision images of potential landing sites.
Then, in 2025, it would return to the surface with Moon 27, which Zelenyi called “I think it’s the most important.” Like the lander arriving this year, Moon 27 will be targeted the south pole of the moon and carry European landing software. But also the robot, by the kindness of the European Space Agency, would be a premiere: a drill that can gather the lunar rock of the South Pole without melting compounds such as water ice found in the material.
In addition, the lander will carry a suite of tools designed to study how solar wind, a constant flow of charged particles flowing from the sun and over the solar system, affects the lunar surface.
The last two missions in the Moon series described by Zelenyi do not yet have release dates. But Moon 28, also known as Luna-Grunt, would be built directly on its predecessor by bringing back to Earth cryogenically stored samples from the lunar south pole that would retain water ice and other so-called volatile compounds.
“It’s a return of the sample, but a different sampling than the one that was done earlier,” Zelenyi said. “It simply came to our notice then [lunar dirt] but all volatile and cryogenic inclusions, which is a technical challenge. “
Eventually, Moon 29 will carry a new Lunokhod rover, returning to Soviet missions. Lunokhod-1 became the first successful rover in another world in 1970 and spent 10 months exploring the region known as the Great Imbrium, or Sea of Rains.
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