The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) are planning to send a lunar lander to an unexplored area of the moon’s south pole in the first of a series of missions designed to assess conditions for a possible settlement.
According to BBC News, which broke the news of the proposed collaboration between the two space agencies, the mission will be called Luna 27 and will assess whether or not there is enough water and raw materials there to make fuel and oxygen. It is scheduled to launch in 2020.
The project is said to be one of several Roscosmos-led missions designed to return astronauts to the moon, the UK news organization reported. Luna 27 will pick up where Soviet-era projects of the 1970s left off, Professor Igor Mitrofanov of the Space Institute in Moscow explained.
“We have to go to the Moon. The 21st Century will be the century when it will be the permanent outpost of human civilization,” Mitrofanov, the lead scientist on the mission, told the BBC. “Our country has to participate in this process… [and] we have to work together with our international colleagues,” including the ESA and the US space agency NASA, he added.
Missions to hunt for usable water-ice, other resources
Likewise, Bérengère Houdou, head of the lunar exploration group at the ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), said that he and his colleagues “have an ambition to have European astronauts on the Moon.” Houdou also confirmed to the BBC that the agency was involved in “discussions at international level… on how to go back to the Moon.”
The ESA has been mulling over the possibility of building a moon base for three years, and when Johann-Dietrich Wörner took over as the head of the agency, one of the first things he brought up was his desire to recruit international partners to construct such a facility on the lunar dark side.
Reports indicate that the early missions will be unmanned, and that Luna 27 will be landing on the outskirts of the South Pole Aitken (SPA) basin. The south polar region on the moon is dark nearly all of the time, and is among the coldest places in the Solar System, which means that it could be rich in water and other chemicals that have been shielded from the sun’s heat.
Dr. James Carpenter, lead scientist on the project for the ESA, told BBC News, “The south pole of the Moon is unlike anywhere we have been before… Due to the extreme cold there you could find large amounts of water-ice and other chemistry… which we could access and use as rocket fuel or in life-support systems to support future human missions.”
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