Academician Lev Zeleny explained the reason for the postponement of the launch of “Luna-25”

“All you need is a win”

The launch of the “mission of the year” – the Luna-25 apparatus, previously planned for August – has been postponed to next year, Yury Borisov, Director General of Roscosmos, said at the Eastern Economic Forum. Correspondent “MK” learned the reasons for the transfer.

The device was supposed to be launched on August 22 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and land for the first time on the South Pole of the Moon, where there are the richest deposits of water ice. It was planned to get to the ice by cryogenic drilling of a 2-meter well – for this, the device was equipped with a special drilling rig

Initially, it was planned to launch our lunar lander in November or December 2019 using the Soyuz 2.1b launch vehicle. Then Roscosmos postponed the launch to 2021, designating the most optimal “window” between July and October 2021.

Further, Luna-25 was again pushed back – already to August 2022. According to experts, this was due to the need to complete fire tests of the propulsion system, with which problems had previously arisen, as well as the need for additional time to work out the station’s systems.

However, these and later electrostatic tests of the device, as well as tests in a thermal chamber closest to the conditions of a real space flight, again showed that Luna-25 was not ready for launch.

In Roskosmos, this was explained by “certain technical difficulties regarding the device of an external manufacturer”, namely, the Doppler velocity and range meter (DISD-LR) developed at the Vega Concern JSC. Shortly before the launch, it turned out that its characteristics did not meet the requirements of the technical specifications. In other words, it could not work during landing and break a unique device.

It was necessary to refine the landing scheme and control algorithms and conduct additional testing. This is now being done by specialists from NPO them. Lavochkin. If the tests are successful, then Luna-25 will go to the Moon in the launch “astronomical window” of 2023, from July to August.

“Without the DISD-LR device, it is impossible to make a soft landing,” Academician Lev Zeleny, scientific director of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (this is the head scientific organization of the mission for scientific payload), explained the situation to MK. – We at the RAS decided that we only need a victory, and we’d better wait one year, but we will be sure that our device will successfully land on the moon, as once, in Soviet times, the first Soviet Lunas successfully landed.

But there are also the following devices – from Luna-26 to Luna-28. The latter is supposed to deliver regolith samples from the Moon to Earth. And now we have no doubts that the lunar program will develop.