Russia launches a mission to be the first to extract water from the Moon

In the midst of a war with Ukraine and facing Western countries, Russia is going to try to make history by becoming the first country to successfully land on the south pole of the Moon, the new promised land of space exploration.

Moscow plans to launch this Friday Luna-25, a robotic probe whose objective is to land near the Bogulawsky crater, a depression 97 kilometers in diameter. The south pole of the Moon, riddled with craters, presents enormous difficulties for landing; but it can also house extremely valuable ice reserves that are probably hidden underground in areas where, due to the position of the satellite, sunlight never reaches.

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The name of this mission is not accidental. Russia revives the saga of Soviet probes that during the 1960s and 70s were the first to orbit the Moon, land on it and show its hidden face, before the United States. Luna-24 managed to reach an equatorial zone of the satellite, take soil samples and send them back to our planet in 1976; quite an achievement. The problem was that by then the United States, determined to win the space race, had already managed to send astronauts to the Moon and bring them back loaded with lunar rocks.

Half a century later, the world is experiencing a new lunar race led by the United States, which wants to take astronauts to the South Pole within two years. Russia is unable to match that feat, but with Luna-25 it can be the first nation to land in that unexplored area and touch, for the first time, the water of the Moon.

80% chance of success

“We still have the experience of the Soviet era, and we have prepared very carefully for this landing,” Lev Zeleny, scientific director of the Russian Space Research Institute, told RT. “I think we have taken into account the main difficulties and I hope that the landing will be soft.” Mission engineers estimate that the mission has at least an 80% chance of success.

Luna-25 is scheduled to lift off on Friday aboard a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in northeast Russia. It is a location chosen in part so that everything in this mission stays within the country’s borders, as it was normally launched from Kazakhstan. It also allows a more direct trajectory and without going through large inhabited areas. As a precaution, Russia has evacuated 26 residents of the village of Shakhtinskyi, who will be accommodated in a hotel and invited to watch the takeoff, Reuters reports.

Technicians from the Russian space agency finalize the details of the Luna-25 module.Roscosmos

The mission is years behind schedule due to ongoing technical difficulties, including the failure of its predecessor Phobos Grunt, a joint Chinese-European project aimed at Mars. The war in Ukraine and the Western embargoes have been another huge stumbling block. Before the invasion of Ukraine, the European Space Agency was going to contribute to the project with a camera, but everything was canceled and Russia has no choice but to go to the Moon alone.

The primary landing spot—with two other secondary targets in case something goes wrong—has been carefully selected using data taken by the US orbiting probe LRO. The Russians believe that the Bogulawsky crater (named after a Prussian artillery officer who participated in the invasion of Russia during the Napoleonic wars) is one of the points on the pole where there may be more water, a key element for future manned missions. Oxygen and hydrogen can serve as rocket fuels to one day travel to Mars and beyond; and water can support the first human colonies.

Landing on the Moon is always a huge challenge—only the United States, Soviet Russia, and China have managed it—because there is no atmosphere to slow you down. Luna-25 will have to entrust everything to its rockets to slow down and not fall into an abrupt area that makes it capsize, which already happened to some of its predecessors half a century ago. Last April, the Japanese probe Hakuto-R crashed trying to land on the Moon.

heat with plutonium

On our satellite there are 14.5 Earth days of sunlight and as many at night. During the day it reaches 120 degrees, but when the sun goes down the temperature at the pole can drop to more than 200 degrees below zero. The Russian probe carries solar panels to operate during the day and a radioisotope device to generate heat with plutonium at night, while it hibernates until dawn again.

The Russian apparatus carries eight scientific instruments. The most striking is a robotic arm that will dig a few centimeters in search of ice, collect it and analyze it with different instruments capable of telling if there is water, how much and possibly also its origin. The vehicle is also equipped to search for other elements of interest: thorium, potassium, uranium.

Locations selected for the landing of the probe.Roscosmos

It is thought that 4.5 billion years ago, Earth collided with Theia, a planet the size of Mars. The blow was so brutal that our planet disappeared for a few hours. A small part was ejected and mixed with the remains of the other body, turned into molten rock. The result was the Moon.

Whether the satellite’s water is a holdover from that time or whether it came aboard asteroids and comets that impacted both the Moon and Earth with their payload is a huge mystery. “The first excavation of the lunar polar regolith will be a step into the unknown,” the mission’s scientific leaders highlight in a recent analysis. “The study of macromolecular compounds of cosmic origin preserved in lunar glaciers can reveal the secret of the origin of life on Earth and will allow us to compare biochemical molecular structures on Earth and in space”, they highlight.

Luna-25 is the first in a series of missions with which Russia wants to return to the Moon after more than 40 years. “The Russian lunar program is already planning the next landing craft based on the development of the Luna-25 design,” said Maxim Litvak, one of the mission’s chief scientists. “After Luna-26, which will be an orbital probe, two landing stations will follow. Luna-27 will carry a drilling rig (to penetrate five feet into the ground), and Luna-28 will bring soil from the Moon’s polar region to Earth,” he detailed.

After takeoff, scheduled for early Friday morning, the Russian spacecraft will take between four and five days to reach the satellite. Once there, it will orbit for a few more days until it ignites its rockets and begins its descent towards the South Pole. If all goes well, he won’t win the space race, but he will make history.

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