The first Russian lunar probe launched in nearly fifty years, Luna-25, was successfully placed in lunar orbit on Wednesday August 16, Russian space agency Roscosmos announced. “For the first time in contemporary Russian history, an automatic station was placed in lunar orbit at 12:03 p.m. Moscow time [11:03 a.m. Paris time],” the agency told France-Presse the press service of Roscosmos.
The launch of the Luna-25 probe is the first lunar mission for Moscow since 1976, when the USSR was a pioneer in the conquest of space.
“All Luna-25 systems are working normally, communication with her is stable,” according to the same source. The orbiting was carried out using the probe’s engine, which was plugged in twice starting at 11:57 a.m. Moscow time, the first time for 243 seconds, the second time for 76 seconds, explained Roscosmos in a statement. The probe will circle the moon, 100 kilometers from its surface, before its scheduled lunar landing on Monday north of Boguslawski crater on the lunar south pole, according to the agency.
A new impetus for the Russian space sector
On Sunday, the cameras installed on the probe made the first photos from space, where we can see elements of the probe with, in the distance, the Earth and the Moon, announced Roscosmos.
The probe of nearly 800 kilos carried by a Soyuz rocket took off on the night of August 10 to 11 from the Vostotchny cosmodrome in the Far East. This probe, which will have to stay on the Moon for a year, will have the task of taking samples and analyzing the soil of the Moon. “For the first time in history, the moon landing will be performed on the lunar South Pole. So far, everyone landed in the equatorial zone,” said a senior Roscosmos official, Alexander Blokhin, in a recent interview with the official newspaper Rossiïskaïa Gazeta.
The mission is intended to give new impetus to the Russian space sector, which has been struggling for years due to funding problems and corruption scandals, and now isolated due to the conflict in Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has promised to continue the Russian space program despite sanctions, taking as an example the USSR sending the first man into space in 1961, in the midst of escalating East-West tensions.
