Europe and Russia Are Headed Back To the Moon Together (bbc.com)

MarkWhittington writes: Russia is turning its attention to the moon again for the first time in about 40 years. The first Russian mission to the moon since long before the end of the Cold War will be Luna 27, a robot lander that will touch down on the edge of the lunar South Pole as early as 2020. Russia is looking for international partners to help make Luna 27 a reality and may have found one in the European Space Agency, according to a story on the BBC. "The initial missions will be robotic. Luna 27 will land on the edge of the South Pole Aitken basin. The south polar region has areas which are always dark. These are some of the coldest places in the Solar System. As such, they are icy prisons for water and other chemicals that have been shielded from heating by the Sun. According to Dr. James Carpenter, ESA's lead scientist on the project, one of the main aims is to investigate the potential use of this water as a resource for the future, and to find out what it can tell us about the origins of life in the inner Solar System."

Comments

Re:50 years

[91degrees]

Russia already landed a probe on the moon in 1966. Several months before the US managed to do the same. Actually, depending on what you consider a "landing" the first man made object on the moon was a Russian probe in 1959.

Re:50 years

[NotDrWho]

Not only that, but they were the first country to use an actual rover to explore, decades before the U.S. started using them.

Re:50 years

[Opyros]

Forgetting Skylab, now are we? Mir was bigger and modular (Skylab was monolithic), but it wasn't the first space station - construction started over a decade after Skylab was launched.

The GP isn't talking about Mir; the first space station was Salyut 1.