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Russia completed final preparations for the launch of its first lunar landing spacecraft in 47 years on Thursday, racing to be the first power to make a soft landing on the moon's south pole, which may contain huge concentrations of water ice.
For years, scientists have speculated about the presence of water on the moon, which is 100 times drier than the Sahara desert. NASA maps from 2018 revealed water ice under the moon's shadows, while NASA verified the presence of water in the sunlit sections in 2020.
A Soyuz 2.1v rocket carrying the Luna-25 ship will launch from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles (5,550 km) east of Moscow, on Friday at 02:11 Moscow time (04:41am IST) and will land on the moon on August 23, according to Russia's space agency.
The Russian lunar mission, the first since 1976, is competing with India, which launched its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander last month, as well as the United States and China, both of which have sophisticated lunar exploration projects.
"The last one was in 1976, so there's a lot riding on this," said Asif Siddiqi, a history professor at Fordham University.
"Russia's aspirations for the moon are mixed up in a variety of things." First and foremost, I believe it is a manifestation of national might on the world stage."
Although US astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the moon in 1969, it was the Soviet Union's Luna-2 mission in 1959 that was the first spacecraft to reach the moon's surface, and the Luna-9 mission in 1966 that was the first to conduct a soft landing on the moon.
However, Moscow then focused on researching Mars, and Russia has failed to launch probes beyond Earth's orbit since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Luna-25 mission has a lot riding on it, especially since the Kremlin claims that Western sanctions over the Ukraine war have failed to harm the Russian economy.
"Let me put it this way: If Russia prevailed and the Indian probe succeeded, it would really be something," Saddiqi added, referring to Russia's deteriorating space missions in recent decades.
Water from the moon?
Major nations such as the United States, China, India, Japan, and the European Union have all been exploring the moon in recent years, however a Japanese lunar landing last year and an Israeli mission in 2019 both failed.
No country has ever successfully landed on the South Pole. In 2019, an Indian mission, Chandrayaan-2, failed.
The rough terrain makes landing difficult, but the prize for locating water ice there might be historic: large amounts of ice could be utilised to extract fuel and oxygen, as well as for drinking water.
"From the standpoint of science, the most important task, to put it simply, is to land where no one else has landed," remarked Maxim Litvak, leader of the Luna-25 scientific equipment planning group.
"There are signs of ice in the soil of the Luna-25 landing area, which can be seen from orbit," he added, adding that the Luna-25 will collect samples for at least one earth year.
The Russian space agency Roskosmos estimated that a trip to the moon would take five days. The craft would take 5-7 days in lunar orbit before descending on one of three probable landing locations near the pole, implying that it may match or slightly beat its Indian opponent to the moon's surface.
Chandrayaan-3 will conduct research for two weeks, whereas Luna-25 will spend a year on the moon.
Luna-25, weighing 1.8 tonnes and carrying 31 kg (68 pounds) of scientific equipment, will use a scoop to collect rock samples from depths of up to 15 cm (6 inches) to test for the presence of frozen water capable of supporting human life.
It has the capability of exploring the moon's regolith — the layer of loose surface material — to a depth of 10 centimetres and contains a dust monitor as well as a wide-angle ionic energy-mass analyzer, which offers measurements of ion parameters in the moon's exosphere.
Russia has been preparing a mission like this for decades. The launch, which was initially scheduled for October 2021, has been postponed for over two years. The European Space Agency had planned to test its Pilot-D guidance camera by connecting it to the Luna-25 spacecraft, but it severed connections with the project after Russia invaded Ukraine in February of last year.
Residents of a village in Russia's far east will be evacuated at 7.30 a.m. on Friday due to a "one in a million chance" that one of the rocket stages that launches Luna-25 may crash land there, according to a local official.
