In the midst of war, Russia launches 1st lunar mission since 1976 – 08/06/2023 – Sidereal Messenger

Amid the war with Ukraine, Russia will try to regain its status as an interplanetary power with the launch of that country’s first unmanned lunar mission in nearly five decades. The vehicle has already been housed in the hood of the Soyuz-2.1b rocket, and the launch is expected for the night of next Thursday (10), early on Friday in Moscow.

Conceived since the end of the 1990s, the mission was called Luna-Glob, but was renamed Luna-25 to evoke a continuation of the Soviet lunar program, whose last representative was Luna-24, from 1976. It is a small landing module developed by the IKI (Space Research Institute) and built by the company NPO Lavochkin.

The Russian space program has been slowly eroding since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its main activities are currently participating in the International Space Station, which remains unabated even with the war, and launching satellites.

All post-Soviet attempts to leap beyond Earth orbit, however, have failed, starting with the Mars 96 mission, which was to involve a Mars orbiter and lander, but failed during launch in 1996.

The Phobos-Grunt mission, which was supposed to sample one of the Martian moons, met the same dismal end in 2011. More recently, the Russians collaborated on a lander for the European Schiaparelli mission, which made the interplanetary journey but ended up crashing to the surface of Mars in 2016.

The Russians were about to try again a Martian landing mission in 2022, but the invasion of Ukraine led the ESA (European Space Agency) to stop collaborating on the launch of the Rosalind Franklin rover, which would use Russian landing technology. Now, with Luna-25, the Russians have another chance to restore their prestige in interplanetary missions.

The 1,750 kg module is due to descend into the Boguslavsky crater, near the coveted lunar south pole, in what promises to be the first mission of an international research station planned between China and Russia. Modest, its main objective is technological: to demonstrate the landing capability. Despite this, it contains around 30 kg of payload distributed across nine instruments, capable of analyzing surface composition and taking measurements of dust and micrometeorites.

The takeoff, from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, in Russia’s far east, is expected at 8:10 pm on Thursday (Brasília time), and puts Russia in a particular race with India. The Indians launched their Chandrayaan-3 lunar mission in July, and it is already in lunar orbit, but is not expected to make a landing attempt until late August. Flying on a faster trajectory, Russia’s Luna-25 should get there sooner. It remains to be seen whether it will work.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, expects this to be just the first of several missions to the Moon and already has the next two, Luna-26 and 27, respectively an orbiter and a more robust landing module, in the works.

This column is published on Mondays in the printed version, in Folha Corrida.

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