Moonstruck: ESA and Russian Federation to launch new mission

Luna 27, the joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmo), will focus on visiting the South Pole-Aitken, an area of Earth’s natural satellite that has yet to be explored.

The spacecraft will assess whether there is water, and raw materials to make fuel and oxygen.

The Interact Centaur Rover…Russian Space Agency Roscosmos plan to send a lander to the Moon’s South Pole to explore the feasability of a permanent human settlement on the Moon. Luna 27 will pick up where Soviet-era projects of the 1970s left off, Professor Igor Mitrofanov of the Space Institute in Moscow explained. “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.

ESA will provide an on-board laboratory similar to the instrument on the Philae lander, which touched down on the surface of Comet 67P previous year.

Bérengère Houdou, the head of the lunar exploration group of the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Amsterdam, also talked about the European ambition “to have European astronauts on the Moon”.

The ESA’s involvement in the moon mission, which is slated to begin in five years, according to the BBC report, is set to undergo final approval consideration in 2016.

Dr James Carpenter, Esa’s lead scientist on the project, says that by sending robotic missions to that region of the Moon, the space agencies are looking to investigate whether there is water in usable form and if so whether it can be used as a resource for the future.

“There are now discussions at global level going on for broad cooperation on how to go back to the Moon”, he added. This mission will start out with robots in 2020 but scientists plan to eventually develop several human bases.

Experts believe that as the region is extremely cold, one could find large amounts of water-ice and other chemistry which astronauts can use as rocket fuel or for life-support systems to support future human missions. The environment of the region is completely different.