Moscow’s Luna-25 lander was successfully placed in the Moon’s orbit on Wednesday, the first such Russian mission in almost 50 years, space agency Roscosmos announced. With the lunar launch, Moscow’s first since 1976, Russia is seeking to restart and rebuild on the Soviet Union’s pioneering space programme. “For the first time in Russia’s contemporary history, an automatic station was placed in lunar orbit at 12:03pm Moscow time,” a Roscosmos spokesperson told AFP. The probe will orbit 100 kilometres (62 miles) above the Moon’s surface, before a planned landing Monday north of the Boguslawsky crater on the lunar south pole. “All the ‘Luna-25’ systems are operating normally, and communication with it is stable,” the spokesperson said.
Cameras installed on the lander have already taken distant shots of the Earth and Moon from space.
The lander, weighing around 800kg (1,764 pounds), was carried into space by a Soyuz rocket launched Friday from the Vostochny cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East. It is expected to stay on the Moon for a year, where it is tasked with collecting samples and analysing soil.
In this grab released by the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos last Friday, a Soyuz 2.1b rocket with the Luna-25 lander blasts off from the launch pad at the Vostochny cosmodrome, some 180km north of Blagoveschensk, in the Amur region. (AFP)