The Soyuz rocket carrying the Luna-25 mission successfully took off on Friday August 11 from the Vostochny cosmodrome, on the edge of Siberia, near the border with China. For the first time since 1976, Moscow is embarking on the conquest of the Moon, with an unmanned mission which must “take samples and analyze the lunar soil”, and “conduct long-term scientific research”, according to the agency. Russian spacecraft Roscosmos.
Beyond its scientific interest, the political challenge of this mission is to restore the image of the Russian space sector, by showing that despite the end of the USSR, budget cuts, ruptures in cooperation with Western agencies (including NASA and Esa), and corruption scandals, Russia can still shine in space.
Its successful launch, Luna-25 must now transit to the Moon for five days then place itself in orbit for three to seven days, the time for mission control on Earth to detect a satisfactory landing site in this region with tormented reliefs. .
The pressure will be all the more intense at Roscosmos as another machine, Indian for its part, will also be about to land near the South Pole. Chandrayaan-3, launched on July 14 and arrived in lunar orbit on August 6, is scheduled to attempt to land a rover on August 23, when Luna-25’s lunar landing window ends. The Russian engineers will therefore probably not have the leisure to wait for new data to confirm that the landing site they have chosen is perfectly suitable…
The technologies used for the Luna-25 mission, so named to mark the continuity with the Soviet lunar missions stopped in 1976, have evolved only slightly. Without budgets and deprived of partnerships with other space agencies, Russian researchers and engineers, despite their world-renowned expertise, struggle to upgrade rockets, on-board computers, energy management equipment or even software. machinery guidance. Thus, in November 2011, the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission which was to go to Mars got stuck in Earth orbit and disintegrated in the atmosphere. The situation has worsened since 2022 and the invasion of Ukraine, with the military gobbling up even more budget.
