Eat your heart out, NASA: Russia is going to the moon, and you’re not invited.
It’s not quite the Cold War race of the 1960s that eventually resulted in the United States landing a man on the moon — after all, staunch U.S. allies in Europe are helping Russia out — but it does show Russia wants to make its mark as NASA and the European Space Agency make their marks with groundbreaking achievements in space in recent years.
The mission isn’t a manned one: the goal is to land a robot probe on a part of the moon that is as yet unexplored, according to a New Zealand Herald report.
The ESA is expected to sign off on this project, which will be led by the Russians but will be assisted by the ESA, and it is part of a series of missions that could lead to astronauts landing on the moon once again.
Dubbed Luna 27, it is set to take place within five years, and restarts a program that was scuttled by the Soviet Union back in the 1970s.
The probe will look for materials in the soil of the moon as well as rocks that could be used to allow for astronauts to get access to water, oxygen, and fuel — certainly an exciting scientific achievement in and of itself that could even lead to some lessons learned that could prove useful in future manned missions to Mars.
NASA will certainly take keen interest in Russia’s Luna-Glob project, which was described in a recent article posted on NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, a portion of which is excerpted below:
“After many years of hiatus, scientists at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences will resume Russia’s Moon-exploration program with the launch of the Luna-Glob probe in 2014. They have chosen six locations for landing automatic stations, similar to the Lunakhod rovers landed several decades ago.
“The Luna-Glob probe was designed for studying the Moon’s Polar Regions after NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter discovered the presence of water ice in polar craters that are constantly in the sun’s shadow. This was a significant discovery because the polar environment is so different from the territories studied by the Russian and American “Luna” and “Apollo” programs.
“The pores of the moon’s soil (called lunar regolith) are filled with water. This is similar to the earth’s permafrost and can be described as “lunar permafrost”. The Luna-Glob probe will study its properties using special equipment, which will assess the content of water in the soil. It has a mechanical hand to collect the samples of soil at depths up to two meters. These samples will be analyzed in detail by equipment onboard the probe. The results will help reveal from where water appeared on the Moon and also on the Earth because our planet was originally dry and hot, says the institute’s Igor Mitrofanov.
“‘Possibly, comets brought water onto the Moon and also the Earth. There are two significant differences between the Earth and Moon. The Earth has a stronger gravitational field and a thick atmosphere. Owing to this the Earth could hold out, water and rivers, lakes and oceans appeared, and later, all this led to the origin of life. The Moon has no atmosphere and has a weak gravitational field. Water on its surface can be only under the conditions of extreme cold,’ Igor said.
“Water is necessary not only for research purposes. It is an important resource for the exploration of the Moon, which will be most likely started from the poles.”