Russia Launches Luna-25 South Pole Lander: First Moon Mission in 47 Years

Russia Launches Luna-25 South Pole Lander: First Moon Mission in 47 Years

Russia launched an uncrewed spacecraft, called Luna-25, Friday, Aug. 11, 2023, designed to land on the south pole of the Moon—the country's first attempt since 1976. Russia seeks to become the first nation to make a soft landing on the moon’s icy south pole. Luna-25 took off from Vostochny Cosmodrome in the country’s southeast at 2:11 a.m. local time, according to Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos. The Vostochny Cosmodrome is a Russian spaceport in the Amur Oblast of the Russian Far East. It is an alternative to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

It will take just over five days for the Luna-25 spacecraft to travel to the Moon’s vicinity, Roscosmos said. Then it will spend several days orbiting before attempting a soft landing on the lunar surface, north of the Boguslawsky crater, on Aug. 21, 2023, the agency said. Boguslawsky is a lunar impact crater that is located near the Moon's southern lunar limb.

This timetable pits Russia in a race with  India, which launched a similar mission—the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander—last month and is aiming to soft-land by Aug. 23. “We hope to be first,” Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov reportedly said at the launch.

Borisov, director general of Roscosmos, hailed Friday’s launch as a “new page” for Russian space exploration. “All the results of the research will be transferred to Earth,” he said on state television. “We are interested in the presence of water, as well as many other experiments related to the study of the soil, the site.” He noted that the mission is bound to face some “obstacles” along the way.

Video Credit: Roscosmos/RT

Acknowledgement: ShanghaiEye魔都眼

Caption Credit: The Washington Post

Duration: 1 minute, 12 seconds

Release Date: Aug. 11, 2023

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