Russia has launched its inaugural lunar research outpost, Luna-25. The mission began at 02:11 Moscow time from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, riding the Soyuz-2.1b rocket with the Fregat upper stage. The journey to the Moon is expected to unfold over roughly five days.
The successor to a Soviet legacy
Luna-25 marks Russia’s first Moon mission in the post-Soviet era, yet the numeral mirrors a continuity with the Soviet program. The last Luna mission, Luna-24, flew in 1976 amid the Apollo era and the lunar race. While many attempts dotted the program, only successful flights carried numbers and earned public attention; several lunar endeavors belonged to the Zond and Cosmos series. In total, eight Soviet probes landed on the Moon, compared with five American robotic landings and six manned Apollo missions.
The Soviet lunar program achieved notable success with Luna 16 through Luna 24, except Luna-18, delivering soil samples or deploying a robotic rover. Luna-24, though ahead of its time, detected about 0.1% water in the brought-back soil, a finding that initially met skepticism as the Moon was considered bone-dry by some scientists. Apollo crews also found water in samples, but executives attributed it to atmospheric moisture. It wasn’t until the Clementine mission in the 1990s that scientists widely acknowledged the presence of ice on the Moon.
Where does Luna-25 fly?
A renewed interest in the Moon in the 21st century centers on the discovery of water and volatile compounds in the lunar regolith. The reserves are concentrated near the lunar poles, with Luna-25 targeting a landing north of the Boguslavsky crater, and a resource-rich zone southwest of the Manzini crater, just south of the 70th parallel. Earlier missions such as China’s Chang’e-4 (near 45.5° S) and the mid-20th century Surveyor-7 (around 40.86° S) provide historical context. Satellite imagery suggests both Luna-25 landing sites have substantial water ice deposits.
Why does Luna-25 fly?
Most of the engineers and scientists who contributed to the historic Soviet lunar missions have since passed away or retired, making a modern launch a rare achievement in organizational persistence. The very act of deploying Luna-25 stands as a meaningful milestone in national space capability.
“Reviewing past work, such as the development and use of drilling rigs, highlights how teams accomplished so much with limited resources. They built everything from scratch, possessed limited Moon knowledge, and lacked advanced computer modeling. Progress came through countless full-scale tests and relentless problem solving.”
— attributed to Maxim Litvak, professor at IKI RAS and chief planner of the probe’s scientific equipment complex (citation).
The principal scientific aim of Luna-25 is to identify water and other volatile compounds in the lunar regolith, and to study soil and dust. These findings aim to address fundamental questions about the Moon’s origin and evolution, and to illuminate current surface conditions. The Moon’s polar regions operate as vast natural storage chambers, preserving materials that have fallen from space over billions of years. Analyzing these layers can illuminate the history of the Sun, the Solar System, and the broader Universe.
As a new lunar race unfolds in the 21st century, a central objective is establishing a long-term outpost on the Moon. Building a sustained presence depends on local resources, reducing the need to haul every brick and every liter of water from Earth. Discovering where ice lies within the soil, its form, and how it can be extracted is crucial. Beyond ice, future astronauts will require shelter materials and tools, and researchers must determine what can be realistically mined from the lunar regolith at scale. This data will inform both Russian and international partners if Moon missions and a surface base take shape in the early 2030s.
How is Luna-25 arranged?
Visually, the craft resembles Luna-24 but with a redesigned core. The landing stage remains the lower portion, still recognizable by the rounded fuel tanks. The upper section shifts from the Soviet approach of delivering lunar soil to Earth, to an on-site scientific laboratory capable of autonomous operation.
On the surface, eight STS-L camera units will guide the mission. Four panoramas cover different directions, two provide stereo views to assist the manipulator, and two command the descent orientation downward. The LMC manipulator acts as the rover’s arm, digging into lunar soil to study its mechanical properties and then placing samples into onboard instruments. An infrared spectrometer, LIS-TV-RPM, is mounted on the manipulator bracket to remotely analyze soil composition during excavation.
ADRON-LR, a neutron and gamma-ray detector, plays a pivotal role in locating water. It sits beneath the lander and can sense ice or hydrogen up to about 60 centimeters deep without direct contact. The ARIES-L ion energy-mass analyzer investigates the lunar exosphere, while the PmL detector examines scattered dust.