Europe to decide on possibility of joint lunar project with Russia by yearend - source
MOSCOW. Oct 15 (Interfax-AVN) - The European Space Agency (ESA) may decide on its participation in Russian lunar projects, including the delivery of lunar soil samples to the Earth, in the end of this year, a source in the Russian Academy of Sciences' Space Research Institute told Interfax-AVN.
"A decision on the ESA involvement in the Russian lunar program may be made in the end of this year when the ESA Council of Ministers meets," he said.
The ESA may take part in every stage of the Russian lunar program, including the development of an autonomous navigation system to provide a safe high-precision landing, a sampling system, including a drilling tool, and a communication system.
"For a more distant future, Russian and European specialists are considering the concept of a joint mission to bring the Moon's polar regolith to the Earth. The mission due in the beginning of the next decade will finalize the first stage of automatic lunar research and lay down scientific and engineering groundwork for joint automatic and manned missions," the source said.
He noted that the Russian lunar exploration program consisted of several missions. The Luna-25 landing module (formerly called Luna-Globe) will be launched in 2018. Luna-26 will be launched the year after to study the Moon from a low polar orbit with an altitude of about 50-100 kilometers. The next landing module, Luna-27, will be launched in 2019 and, the same as Luna-25, will study soil on the Moon's South Pole and specific features of its polar exosphere. The next stages of the program scheduled for the 2020s envisage the delivery of regolith samples to the Earth and the landing of a lunar rover on the Moon.