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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."
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.
It's also only 40 years after the first mission of ESA (maybe still ESRO?) to the moon. That's probably why the title contains "Headed Back".
Not only that, but they were the first country to use an actual rover to explore, decades before the U.S. started using them.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Hopefully they won't fake there landing like the Americans did.
Yeah, because putting a man on the moon was definitely the last hurtle in space. It's not like Russia went on the put up the first space station, or continued to launch men into space with by far the best safety record of any country, or is the only country in the world today still capable of putting men into space. Nope, the space race definitely ended with the first man on the moon.
USA! USA! USA!
BTW, can someone give us a ride to the ISS, please? We'll pay for gas.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The last time the USSR or Russia launched a successful probe outside of low earth orbit was 1984, with the Vega missions.
Ever since then, they've talked big, and failed big. Usually projects never got as far as physical hardware, but occasionally some things were built, such as the Mars96 impactor, or Fobos-Grunt, but those didn't work.
Russia has a decent track record at building space stations and satellites. For anything further out, they're an embarassing failure.
Europe and Russia Are Headed Back To the Moon Together
Was hoping we'd send Afghanistan and Iran instead. Bummer.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Hmm, Russians used a robotic rover on the moon in 1970.
The USA used a manned rover on the moon in 1971.
Hardly "decades before the US started using them"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Yeah, the Americans had ONE first (first man on the moon). Russia had EVERY OTHER SPACE FIRST.
You win, America! Go USA!
Well, not *every* other space first... and lest we forget, both countries were pretty well bootstrapped with German missile technology. Here are some other U.S. firsts, apart from the whole landing on the moon thingy:
1. First human-made object to leave solar system
2. First communications satellite
3. First solar probe
4. First weather satellite
5. First object successfully recovered from orbit
6. First operational navigation satellite
7. First geosynchronous satellite
8. First probe to land using retrorockets
9. First probe to map the Moon
10. First manual control of a crewed spacecraft
11. First crewed spacecraft to change orbit
12. First rendezvous in space
13. First docking with another spacecraft
14. First crewed mission to leave Earth orbit
15. First to orbit the Moon
16. First spacecraft of any type to perform Trans-Earth injection
17. First successful flyby of Venus
18. First successful Mars flyby
I suppose we could count some of the SpaceX accomplishments, as well, given that Elon Musk has U.S. citizenship:
19. First privately funded, liquid-propellant rocket (Falcon 1) to reach orbit
20. First privately funded company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft (Dragon)
21. First private company to send a spacecraft (Dragon) to the ISS
22. First private company to launch into geosynchronous orbit (ES-8)
23. First private company to deliver a vehicle beyond Earth orbit (DSCOVR)
And that's just the highlights reel.
Europe and Russia Are Headed Back To the Moon Together
Okay, clearly there have been some major developments in geology that I've missed.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Russia is in Europe.
Russia is also in Asia, mainly. w
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/), built, launched, and operated by NASA, is in orbit around the moon right now and doing science there. That makes it the only currently operating spacecraft in orbit around the moon. That is, the USA NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA has so many operating space vehicles out there doing science that people tend to not notice after a while.
The USA sent the first probes to Venus and Mars, Mariner 2 to Venus in 1962 and Mariner 4 to Mars in 1964. The USSR sent the first landers to each, but the first spacecraft to successfully fly by and study the two planets were American.
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.
You mean China?
The Russians have largely gotten lucky, in that most of their Soyuz to catastrophically fail have been the unmanned launches, even though they're largely built on the same components. The failure rate has gotten pretty damned awful of late. As has the rate of dangerous "glitches" on returning vehicles
The number of deaths issue is based on a statistical sample size of only a tiny number of fatal accidents on both sides, and is thus dominated more by noise than by signal. It's also skewed by the size of the crews - each side has only had two fatal space missions, but the US crews were several times larger. The broader category that includes injuries, near misses, etc gives a greater sample size and paints a reversed picture: the rate is far higher on the Russian side.
Why does everyone keep forgetting about China in these conversations?
That was, of course, the US's decision to retire the Shuttle and hitch rides with the Russians. Of course, they couldn't retire the Shuttle when they wanted to, they had to keep it operating to finish the station as the Russians didn't have any launch vehicles nearly large enough to carry the larger payloads. Russia still lags behind in large payloads, particularly in reaching higher orbits - the Proton M, Russia's most powerful rocket, carries 6,7 tonnes to GTO while the Delta IV carries 14,2 tonnes. Early next year the Falcon Heavy should have its maiden launch, with a GTO payload of 21,2 tonnes. Russia has nothing even comparable in the near pipeline.
Russia has always had trouble with heavy lift. The N1 was perhaps one of the most spectacular rocket program failures in history, a rocket about the size of the Saturn V, a massive program, and every launch ended in an explosion. Perhaps their "most successful" heavy lifter was the Energia, but it never flew in its heavy lift configuration, and only flew twice in any configuration at all.
As for missions beyond Earth:
Moon race: 28 failures, 15 successes, versus 16 failures and 16 successes for the US. Notable features include a couple tiny sample returns and the first quality remote rover - versus the US... well, the Apollo Program ;)
Mars: 20 failures, 2 successes (only orbiters, and only "mostly successful), versus 6 failures and 18 successes for the US. Mars was probably the Soviet/Russian space program's biggest realm of embarrassment.
Venus: 16 failures, 13 successes, versus 1 failure and 6 successes. By contrast, Venus was the Soviet/Russian program's biggest success - but largely simply because they threw a lot more things at it than the US, which by and large seemed relatively uninterested in our evil twin.
Mercury: Russia/USSR never tried. US, 2 successes.
Asteroids: Never tried. US, 3 failures, 8 successes.
In fact, Russia/USSR never went anywhere in the solar system outside of Mars. Beyond the asteroid belt, their grand total of attempts was zero. The US has not had a single outer planets mission failure, and 23 successful missions (although some of that is double-counting, as a number of spacecraft visited multiple planets).
Early on, there's no question who was in the lead - the Soviets were, unquestionably. By the mid 1960s, though, the tables had reversed. Since then, the Soviets/Russians have had a pretty spotty record with sp
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
The GP isn't talking about Mir; the first space station was Salyut 1.
Hmm? Are you just trolling, or you actually think that? The moon was first mapped by Luna 3 and Zond 3, that's why the geographical features of the far side are all named after Soviet scientists. And the first probe to orbit the moon was Luna 10. You shouldn't let your ideology get more important than the facts.
entropy happens
The south polar region has areas which are always dark
This means the rover will not be able to rely on solar panels. Will it use a nuclear source? Launching such beasts is quite unpopular.