Landing missions to celestial bodies in the Solar System will form the backbone of Russia’s space research program in the coming decades, a prominent Russian expert said Monday, RIA Novosti reports. “We’ve found our direction, our niche,” Lev Zelyony, the director of the Institute of Space Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said at a press conference in Moscow.
The Soviet Union has a track record of successfully landing unmanned probes on celestial bodies, including two moon rovers as well as a number of probes to Venus, an achievement that has not been reproduced since by any other space agency to date.
However, Russia’s space program was largely halted after the Soviet Union’s collapse, though it is gradually being redeveloped on a smaller scale, Zelyony said. Russia plans to send a succession of five unmanned probes to the Moon between 2015 and 2022, the latest set to retrieve samples of lunar soil.
The 2015 probe was supposed to be called Luna-Glob-1, but the name will be changed to Luna-25, indicating continuity with Soviet-era lunar missions, named Luna-1 through Luna-24, Zelyony said.
Russkiy Mir Foundation Information Service
