After a very long 47-year hiatus in its lunar exploration program, Russia is about to return to our satellite. The probe that has just been launched bears the number 25 of the historic series of ships Moon, that gave the defunct Soviet Union some of its greatest successes in the early years of the space race.
These capsules, which at first were simple metal spheres crowned with antennas and instrument poles, represented great milestones in the history of space exploration since 1959. Moon-1 it was the first artificial planet; This is how it was called, because it was left in orbit around the Sun when its aim failed by 6,000 kilometers (it had to crash into our satellite). Number 2 was indeed the first artificial impact on the Moon and number 3 obtained the first photographs of the hidden face, which, although they were of poor quality, generated a great stir. Later, the Moon-9 landed softly in 1966 and the Moon–10, that same year, it became the first human artifact to orbit another body other than Earth. The USSR scored all those partial victories, prior to the final victory that was the arrival of the US astronauts in 1969.
By the end of 1968, the Soviet Union had already assumed that the race to the moon would be decided in favor of the Americans. The Soviet manned ship and, above all, the rocket that was to launch it had accumulated too much delay. A final possibility to scratch a bit of prestige would have been to send a pair of cosmonauts to complete the first circumlunar voyage, leaving the moon landing to their American competitors; but the flight of apollo 8at Christmas 1968, also dashed those hopes.
From that disappointment, the official mantra prevailed: deny that the USSR had lost the race simply because it had never intended to participate in it. It would not be until glasnost of Mikhail Gorbachev when Moscow would acknowledge the existence of a manned, poorly managed and poorly financed lunar program. Despite everything, the USSR had a plan B. A few years ago, the Lavochkin company, which had built the first and simple lunar probes, was developing the next generation, based on a landing platform capable of carrying different types of lunar probes. of load. Among them, an automatic sample collection capsule or a rolling vehicle.
Thanks to Moon-16, released just a year after the arrival of the Americans, the Soviet Union got its first samples of regolith in 1970. Just 100 grams, collected on the shore of the Mare Fecunditatis plain, the left eye of the face that some see in the lunar disk. It was a great technological feat. The capsule with its valuable cargo lifted off from the Moon on a direct vertical ascent trajectory that would direct it toward Earth like a cannonball, with no course corrections. Plunging into the atmosphere (at more than 10 kilometers per second), it experienced a brutal deceleration of 350 G, 50 times more than what astronauts could withstand making the same journey.
Two months had not passed when the aircraft took off. moon-17. The descent platform was identical, but this time a curious wheeled vehicle traveled on it, the first Lunokhod. For some, his gangly appearance and the double television camera that resembled his eyes made him likeable; others simply found it ugly, like a walking bathtub. It consisted of two sections: the chassis, with eight wheels (plus a ninth that served as an odometer) was capable of withstanding the worst treatment; It was not for nothing that his engineers had gained experience designing battle tanks. It lacked a steering system; to turn, he simply accelerated the wheels on one side and braked those on the opposite.
On the chassis there was a watertight compartment, inside which were the scientific equipment, the radio and the batteries. A lid was opened at sunrise, exposing the bank of photoelectric cells, and closed at night to protect it from the cold. Projected for a useful life of three months (three full lunar days), it resisted for almost a year, traveling about 10 kilometers and carrying out hundreds of tests to determine the composition of the soil and its mechanical resistance. Afterwards, it was abandoned for many years until it was detected by a photographic satellite in 2010. The laser reflector he was carrying still works.
Those two Luna missions, carried out so close in time, constitute one of the great achievements of Soviet astronautics during those heroic years. Others would follow: two to collect samples and another to deposit a second Lunokhod vehicle. This one, by the way, traveled 40 kilometers, more than any rover manned by the astronauts of the Apollo program.
About six years ago, the Lavochkin company offered Lunokhod 2 for auction at Sotheby’s. Richard Garriot, a video game designer, paid almost $70,000 for it, knowing that it is parked in Le Monnier crater and can never be brought back to Earth. It is enough for him to know that he owns the only privately owned vehicle on the Moon. There is a third model, more advanced than his two brothers, but in the end it did not fly due to financial problems. Today it is one more piece in the Lávochkin museum, near Moscow.
Other launches by the USSR to the Moon followed in the 1970s. One, orbital, to photograph and analyze the composition of the surface using remote sensors; and two more for sample collection. And the Moon-24, the last of the series, carried a two meter drill bit that allowed to obtain fragments of deep rock. In total, Russia now has a quarter of a kilo of lunar material.
The new generation
Now the moon-25 it is an entirely new probe, although it still takes advantage of the original design of the moon landing pad. Its main objective is to verify the operation of the modern systems that control it, landing in an area of the Aitken depression, near the lunar south pole. There the Sun’s rays arrive so tangentially that they never illuminate the bottom of some craters. In fact, the moon-25 It does not have its solar panels on top, but on its sides, to make better use of the light. In these dark oases there are deposits of frozen water, as confirmed in 2009 by the first Indian orbital probe, the chandrayan 2.
If everything goes fine, Moon-25 it may be the first vehicle to physically scratch lunar ice. But he is not alone in the race. Since mid-July, another Indian probe has been on its way to the same target, albeit following a much slower trajectory. Previously, the vikraamalso from the Indian Space Agency (ISRO) crashed in 2019 while trying to land at 70º south latitude.
Other recent attempts to land on the Moon (although not in the polar regions) have also been unsuccessful: the Israeli probe Beresheet in 2019 or the lander Hakuto-R Japanese, who was carrying a small rover built by United Arab Emirates. Now, the Japanese space agency (JAXA) is also experimenting with novel technologies, from the moon landing semi-softusing airbags (a first test failed last year) until a descent in a horizontal trajectory, sliding on a skid.
As for NASA, apart from the almost 8,000 million dollars that it has allocated to its Artemis program (divided among consortia led by the companies of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos), it has established contracts with at least four other smaller private companies to develop autonomous landers and rovers. The US plans to send in 2024 three minirovers which will coordinate without direct human intervention to map the lunar surface in 3D, using cameras and ground-penetrating radar. The Moon, and especially its south pole, is going to be very crowded for the next few years.
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