A Soyuz 2.1v rocket carrying the Luna-25 craft blasted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome,5550 kilometres east of Moscow,at 2.11am Moscow time,with its upper stage boosting the lander out of Earth’s orbit towards the moon over an hour later,Russia’s space agency Roscosmos confirmed.
The lander is expected to touch down on the moon on August 21,Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov told Interfax. The space agency previously pegged August 23 as the landing date.
“Now we will wait for the 21st. I hope that a highly precise soft landing on the moon will happen,” Borisov told workers at the Vostochny cosmodrome after the launch,according to Interfax.
Luna-25,roughly the size of a small car,will aim to operate for a year on the moon’s south pole,where scientists at NASA and other space agencies in recent years have detected traces of water ice in the region’s shadowed craters.
There is much riding on the mission,as the Kremlin says the West’s sanctions over the Ukraine war,many of which have targeted Moscow’s aerospace sector,have failed to cripple the Russian economy.
The moonshot,which Russia has been planning for decades,will also test the nation’s growing independence in space after its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine severed nearly all of Moscow’s space ties with the West,besides its integral role on the International Space Station.