MOSCOW, August 11, Tatyana Pichugina. The Soyuz-2.1b rocket launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome brought the Luna-25 automatic interplanetary station to a suborbital trajectory. Upper stage «Frigate» separated normally, the device flies to the Moon. A few days later — preliminary, on August 20 — a soft landing is expected near the South Pole.On the way to our satellite, the landing station «Luna-25» will correct the trajectory twice. In about five days, it will enter a hundred-kilometer-high lunar orbit and spend a few more days there, braking and descending, until it reaches a landing orbit 18 kilometers high. From there, the device will begin landing on the moon. Such a scheme was worked out back in the 1970s.
For landing, they chose the area of the South Pole, where signs of water ice were found. No one has landed successfully at this location yet. The Russian lander will make such a landing for the first time in history.
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Who else is on the Moon
There are currently two space stations operating in Earth satellite orbit. The NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been operating since 2009. On board is the research neutron detector LEND, created at the IKI RAS. It was this device that detected an anomalous concentration of hydrogen molecules at the South Pole, which indirectly indicates the presence of water ice. The impact experiment in the Cabeus crater confirmed these data.
Indian station Chandrayaan-2, launched in 2019, is also in lunar orbit. On its way to the moon now Chandrayaan-3 with a lander on board. The device should also land near the South Pole a few days after the Russian one.
Lunar airfield
The landing site is an ellipse 30×15 kilometers long along the meridian. In its limits «Luna-25» will descend vertically with running engines. The main danger is the slope of the surface. If it is more than 15 degrees, the station may tip over or slide and dig into loose soil. This happened in 1973 with «Lunokhod-2» — the device slid into a five-meter crater and stalled.
The area north of the Boguslavsky crater on the visible side of the Moon was chosen as a priority landing site. Optimal in all respects: convenient ballistics, reliable radio communication with the Earth, day length sufficient for scientific research, and most importantly, a relatively flat low-rocky terrain. The risk of hitting a site with a steep slope is only four percent.
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For scientific tasks, the abundance of signs of water in this place, the diversity of geological rocks is important. It is estimated that there is 0.1 percent water in a meter layer of soil. If for some reason it is not possible to land there, there are two reserve «airfields» — southwest of the Manzini crater or south of the Pentland-A crater.
Luna-25 will be contacted at the Space communications «Bear Lakes» using the TNA-1500 antenna.
What Luna can do -25″
The station was created at the NPO named after Lavochkin. All automatic spacecraft were designed there in the Soviet Union, then in Russia. «Luna-25» with equipment weighs 1750 kilograms. It has engines, antennas, solar panels, batteries, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, control units, and various sensors. Surveillance cameras will film the landing process. Almost everything on board is domestic and new. At this stage, it is necessary to work out the engines, equipment, thermal conditions, security systems.
IKI RAS is responsible for scientific equipment. Several instruments are installed on board the lander. The pride of the developers is the lunar manipulator complex (LMK). This is a robot arm with a bucket and a device for taking soil. Its task is to take samples and send them for analysis to a laser ionization mass spectrometer (LAZMA-LR). A cubic centimeter of lunar earth is enough for that. The most interesting thing is that ice can lie not only in shady places where the sun's rays do not reach, but also in illuminated areas. The robot will have to dig a trench several tens of centimeters deep in order to reach a layer of loose soil interspersed with ice.
The Hadron-LR will search for water — it shoots a beam of neutrons penetrating to a depth of one meter, and analyzes the composition using secondary radiation soil, determines the mass fraction of chemical elements. Another device for searching is an infrared spectrometer (LIS-TV-RPM), designed to measure the absorption lines of chemical elements in a dug trench. The received data will go to Earth. If there is water, it will be detected.