Russia Successfully Launches Luna 25 – Its First Lunar Lander in 47 Years.
The unmanned spacecraft lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur region. The vessel was launched by a Soyuz-2 Fregat rocket at 8:10 AM local time on August 11.
Luna 25 launches from Vostochny Cosmodrome. (Photo: Reuters).
Residents of a nearby village were temporarily evacuated due to the risk of falling rocket stages, Reuters reported.
The spacecraft is expected to enter Earth orbit before transitioning to lunar orbit and landing on the Moon’s surface. The last Russian lunar lander, Luna 24, landed on August 18, 1976.
The Luna 25 mission from Russia and India’s Chandrayaan-3 (launched in mid-July) are both scheduled to land near the Moon’s south pole on August 23. This will be a race to see which country lands first. Roscosmos stated that the two missions are expected to not interfere with each other due to different landing sites, Reuters reported.
Within a year, Luna 25 will study the soil composition in the Moon’s south polar region, as well as the plasma and dust in the extremely thin outer layer of the Moon, or its thin atmosphere.
According to NASA, the four-legged lander consists of a landing rocket, a propulsion fuel tank, solar panels, a computer, and a robotic arm equipped with a shovel for sample collection, along with a toolkit for sample analysis.
Initially, Roscosmos and the European Space Agency planned to collaborate on launching Luna 25, as well as Luna 26, Luna 27, and the ExoMars rover.
However, that collaboration ended in April 2022, following Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, which led to Europe’s severing ties with Moscow.
