INTERESTING ENGINEERING – Russia’s long-delayed robotic Luna-25 mission is at the launch site ahead of a liftoff scheduled for August 11, a report from state media publication TASS explains.
The Luna-25 lander was designed to perform a soft landing on the lunar south pole as the world’s major space players turn their attention to mining the south pole region for ice that can be converted into water, oxygen, and rocket propellant.
Luna-25 is Russia’s first lunar lander since 1976 and it will launch atop a Soyuz 2.1a rocket at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in east Russia.
Firstly, Russian officials must temporarily displace an entire village underneath the Soyuz rocket’s flight path, as there’s a danger its boosters could crash into the settlement. [The launch was carried out Friday morning. No injuries were reported.]
Russia’s first lunar lander since 1976
Russian aerospace company NPO Lavochkina, the builder of the Luna-25 lander, announced in a statement that “work has been completed on the creation of the Luna-25 spacecraft.”
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“It is planned that the device will be the first in the world to carry out a soft landing on the surface of the moon in the south pole region and conduct contact studies of the lunar soil for the presence of ice at the landing site,” the statement continued.
The European Space Agency had planned to test a navigation camera called Pilot-D aboard Luna-25, but it canceled its involvement in the project after Russia invaded Ukraine last year.
Luna-25 is the first domestically-made lunar probe in modern Russian history, according to the TASS report. The NPO Lavochkina statement adds that the lunar lander makes use of “a completely Russian element base and the latest achievements in the field of space instrumentation.”