 Russia will launch its first lunar landing spacecraft in 47 years on Friday in a race with India to the south pole of the Moon, a potential source of water to support a future human presence there. The launch from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles east of Moscow, will take place four weeks after India sent up its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander, due to touch down at the pole on August 23. Rough terrain makes a landing there difficult, but the south pole is a prized destination because scientists believe it may hold significant quantities of ice that could be used to extract fuel and oxygen, as well as for drinking water. Russian space agency Roscosmos said that its Luna-25 spacecraft would take five days to fly to the Moon and then spend five to seven days in lunar orbit before descending on one of three possible landing sites near the pole – a timetable that implies it could match or narrowly beat its Indian rival to the Moon's surface. Roscosmos said the two missions would not get in each other's way because they have different landing areas planned. 'There is no danger that they interfere with each other or collide. There is enough space for everyone on the moon,' said the agency. India's Chandrayaan-3 mission launched last month (Picture: YouTube/ISRO Official) Chandrayaan-3 is due to run experiments for two weeks, while Luna-25 will work on the Moon for a year. In April, Japan's ispace failed in an attempt to make the first Moon landing by a private space company. With a mass of 1.8 tons and carrying 31kg of scientific equipment, Luna-25 will use a scoop to take rock samples from a depth of up to 15cm to test for the presence of frozen water that could support human life. 'The Moon is the seventh continent of the Earth so we are simply 'condemned', as it were, to tame it,' said Lev Zeleny, a space researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and c){kind=link}
NEWS… BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT
Russia will launch its first lunar landing spacecraft in 47 years on Friday in a race with India to the south pole of the Moon, a potential source of water to support a future human presence there.
The launch from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles east of Moscow, will take place four weeks after India sent up its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander, due to touch down at the pole on August 23.
Rough terrain makes a landing there difficult, but the south pole is a prized destination because scientists believe it may hold significant quantities of ice that could be used to extract fuel and oxygen, as well as for drinking water.
Russian space agency Roscosmos said that its Luna-25 spacecraft would take five days to fly to the Moon and then spend five to seven days in lunar orbit before descending on one of three possible landing sites near the pole – a timetable that implies it could match or narrowly beat its Indian rival to the Moon’s surface.