Russia launched its first lunar probe in 47 years on Thursday, in a bid to become the first space power to land on the South Pole, a region believed to harbor coveted deposits of water ice. This is an attempt by Moscow to strengthen its presence in space, since it had not carried out this type of launch for decades.
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The Russian lunar mission, the first since 1976, competes with India, which sent its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander last month, and more broadly with the United States and China, which have advanced lunar exploration programs.
The Soyuz 2.1v rocket carrying the Luna-25 spacecraft lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, 5,550 km east of Moscow, just after 2 am (local time) on Friday.
The lander is expected to reach the Moon on August 21, the head of the Russian space agency, Yuri Borisov, told Interfax on Friday. Previously, the Russian space agency Roscosmos had set August 23 as the landing date.
“Now we will wait for the 21st. I hope there will be a smooth, high-precision moon landing,” Borisov told workers at the Vostochny cosmodrome after the launch, according to Interfax.
Luna-25, about the size of a small car, will attempt to operate for a year at the Moon’s south pole, where scientists from NASA and other space agencies have detected traces of water ice in the shadowy craters in recent years. region of.
The stakes are high on the Luna-25 mission, as the Kremlin says Western sanctions over the Ukraine war, many of which have targeted Moscow’s aerospace sector, have failed to cripple the Russian economy.
The lunar mission will also test Russia’s growing independence in space after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine severed almost all of Moscow’s space ties with the West, apart from its role on the International Space Station, where cooperation of the Russian space agency with NASA is considered crucial to the survival of the outpost.
“Russia’s moon aspirations are mixed in a lot of different ways. I think first and foremost it is an expression of national power on the world stage,” Asif Siddiqi, a Fordham University history professor, told Reuters.
American astronaut Neil Armstrong gained fame in 1969 for being the first person to set foot on the Moon, but the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 mission was the first spacecraft to reach the lunar surface in 1959, and the Luna-9 mission in 1966 was the first to make a soft moon landing.
Moscow then focused on exploring Mars, and since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia had not sent probes beyond Earth orbit.
(Reuters)
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