After months of delays, everything indicates that Russia is ready to return to the Moon after half a century without sending any mission to Earth’s satellite. Among the necessary preparations for the success of the mission, Moscow plans the evacuation of an entire town near the launch site, which will take place next Friday, August 11, as a local official confirmed to Reuters today.
The Luna-25 lunar lander, the first space power to launch for this purpose since 1976, will be launched into space from the Vostochni cosmodrome, which is located some 5,000 kilometers east of the Russian capital. In the previous mission, its predecessor, Luna-24, returned to our planet carrying 170 grams of lunar soil samples.
In that area, residents of the Shakhtinskyi settlement in the Khabarovsk region, which is located southeast of the cosmodrome, will be evacuated early Friday morning. The town is in the area where the rocket boosters are expected to fall after they separate.
“The mouth of the Umalta, Umalta, Ussamakh, Lepikan, Tastakh, Saganar rivers and the area of ??the crossing at the Bureya river are in the expected drop zone,” Alexei Maslov, head of the Verkhnebureinskyi district, told the British agency.
Luna-25 will launch on a Soyuz-2 Fregat booster and will be the first lander to reach the Moon’s South Pole, according to the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The Indian space agency also aims to be the first nation to place a lander at the lunar South Pole on August 23.
The main objective of the Russian mission will be the development of soft landing technologies, the investigation of the internal structure of the Moon and the exploration of resources, including water, found in the form of ice in that region. The lander, which includes a robotic arm, is expected to operate on the lunar surface for one year.
