From the Earth to the Luna Believe it or not but Moscow is returning to the Moon with its first research mission in almost half a century

Russia is back in the space race. At 10 a.m., local time, on Friday, August 11, a Soyuz-2.1b rocket launched from Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur region carried the Luna-25 mission into a partial orbit around Earth before the spacecraft began its five-day autonomous flight to the Moon. (Ahead of the launch, local officials in the Khabarovsk region even evacuated a small town in the mission’s flight path, just in case one of the booster rockets landed here.) Luna-25 is the “successor” to the USSR’s 1976 lunar mission, and it is post-Soviet Russia’s first-ever “soft landing” attempt on the Moon. 

The mission plan

Once it reaches the Moon, Luna-25 will orbit at an altitude of about 100 kilometers (62 miles) before transitioning to an elliptical landing orbit that comes within 12–18 kilometers (about 9.5 miles) above the lunar surface. The spacecraft might hold this orbit for as long as a week to study the landing conditions. Luna-25 has no separate orbital module; the whole station is designed to land on the Moon. It uses its engine to brake twice in orbit to transition to a vertical freefall at an altitude of about 1,000 meters (3,280 feet).

Once in this descent, two more propulsion systems fire, the first at the 1-kilometer mark and then another at 20 meters (about 66 feet) high. 

Because Luna-25 lacks an active maneuvering system for landing (now standard for Chinese and American landers), Russia’s engineers and scientists had less flexibility in choosing a landing site, leading to the cautious selection of an area that forms an ellipse 30×15 kilometers. Russia’s team picked a region at the Moon’s south pole where water in the upper surface layer is highest, according to remote sensing data.

The station itself is durable. Equipped with thermoelectric generators powered by plutonium-238, Luna-25 was built to survive the lunar nights (when temperatures drop to -170ºC/-278ºF) and operate for at least a year on the lunar surface. During lunar days, when it’s actively conducting scientific research, the station runs on its main power supply of solar energy.

The mission is to search for water and volatile compounds in the lunar regolith (the soil, basically) and explore the Moon’s exosphere (its thin, molecular “collision-free” atmosphere). The lander carries 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of scientific instruments to conduct this work.

The mission’s history

Over the years, the Luna-25 mission has been delayed at different times due to accidents, funding shortfalls, and international sanctions. In the mid-1990s, after Russia’s Mars-96 mission fell back to Earth due to rocket failure, the Russian Academy of Sciences decided to pursue two new projects: first, a mission to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, and then a “Luna-Glob” mission from the Earth to the Moon.

The Moon mission was originally entrusted to the same scientific institute responsible for the USSR’s lunar research and scheduled for 2000, but the project was suspended after funding ran out. Moscow restarted this work in 2006 with the signing of an intergovernmental agreement on space cooperation with India but planning halted again when the Fobos-Grunt mission also failed in 2011, proving the unreliability of technology then essential to Russia’s lunar plans. 

In April 2012, Russia’s Academy of Sciences resolved to reacquire interplanetary flight experience through relatively simple lunar missions, beginning with a first launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in 2015, leading up to an unmanned lunar landing planned for 2017. This time, the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences led the mission’s scientific program. 

By the 2010s, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter had identified possible water ice deposits at the Moon’s polar regions, adding scientific and practical impetus to explore the lunar poles. Russian space officials outlined three potential lunar missions and returned to Soviet numeration for their stations — hence “Luna-Glob” became Luna-25.

Due to sanctions imposed in response to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian space exploration now faces new obstacles. The European Space Agency has suspended lunar cooperation and denied Moscow access to the European navigation camera PILOT-D, which was crucial to the Luna-27 mission’s plans for a “smart landing.”

A new space race

If Luna-25 successfully lands on the Moon, it will likely share the lunar south pole with India’s Chandrayaan-3. It’s still unclear which mission will land first. India launched its spacecraft on July 14, and it’s currently scheduled to land on August 23 (about 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, from Russia’s objective), but the Luna-25 could still be first. That’s because the Chandrayaan-3’s lander and rover lack their own sources of heat and power sufficient to survive a lunar night, so the mission’s landing must take place at the start of a lunar day to maximize the available time for exploration. In other words, the landing will be postponed to mid-September if the Chandrayaan-3 isn’t ready to land on August 23.

The Luna-25, on the other hand, can only orbit the Moon for a week, so a landing after August 24 is simply impossible.

Moscow has celebrated Luna-25 as the first-ever mission to one of the Moon’s poles, but India’s Chandrayaan-2 crashed here in 2019 in a failed soft landing. In fact, that mission’s orbiter is still operational and studying the region to this day.

Meanwhile, in just a few weeks, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will launch a “pinpoint lunar landing” mission. In April 2023, a private Japanese uncrewed lunar landing mission carrying the Emirates Lunar Mission failed and crashed into the Moon. 

In addition to competing with former space partner India, Russia also finds itself in the shadow of Chinese and U.S. lunar exploration. In late 2024, NASA plans to send the VIPER rover to the lunar south pole region to prospect for resources in permanently shadowed areas. 

The U.S. is busy promoting its multilateral Artemis Accords to establish a framework for cooperation in the civil exploration and peaceful use of the Moon, Mars, and other astronomical objects. Artemis itself is a Moon exploration program led by NASA and the space agencies of the E.U., Japan, Canada, Israel, and Australia. The program is designed to re-establish a human presence on the Moon, “landing the first woman and first person of color,” according to NASA.

In May 2024, Beijing plans to launch the Chang’e 6 mission to explore the Moon and perform the nation’s second sample return mission, also aiming for the Moon’s south pole. China has signed its own multilateral agreements on lunar cooperation — with Russia and Venezuela.