ESA abandons Russian lunar programs

A few days ago, we celebrated the Russian Yuri Gagarin, the first human to go into space on April 12, 1961. Since that date, Russia had become a leading space power but which had lost its luster after the breakup of the USSR and the coup of its ensuing spatial ambitions. Since then, it had regained its rank as a leading space power, but without ever becoming the number 1 it had been.

For the 2016-2025 decade, it had set up an ambitious program that should allow it to regain its former glory with its expertise in manned flights and its wonderful pitchers. It also intended to rely on numerous programs in cooperation mainly with the Nasa, China and the European Space Agency. Above all, this umpteenth program should allow it to catch up in the field of space services and better compete with the new space.

And then she decides toattack ukraine. The rest, we know. The sanctions taken against whole sections of its economy in a very large number of sectors, including the space sector, could cost it much more than it had expected. In the space field, this war is already having short-term repercussions, but also for the following decades, mainly in space transport, activities in orbit and cooperative exploration programs.

After Mars, ESA will not go to the Moon with the Russians

Following this attack, the director of theESA launched a comprehensive review of all activities carried out in cooperation with Russia and Ukraine. After the postponement of the launch ofExoMars 2022 in order to find alternatives to what the Russians had to provide to the mission, the ESA Council of April 13 took the decision to cease cooperation activities with Russia on missions to the Moon Luna 25, 26 and 27.

It should be noted that the expected acquisition of scientific and technological skills following the use of European equipment on Luna missions is a priority for ESA. The development of this equipment will continue and these will fly on board other, non-Russian programs. Anyway, these projects were difficult to manage, in particular because of the multiple postponements of flights. Already, before the Ukrainian crisis, ESA was considering other flight opportunities, mainly with NASA’s CLPS lunar program, which aims to subcontract the transport of scientific instruments on lunar soil to private companies. and the Lunar Polar Exploration mission jointly carried out by the space agencies of Japan and India.

Where and how will this advanced equipment be used?

Concretely, theProspect instrument of Luna 27 which must demonstrate the technical feasibility of using water ice for many purposes, such as supplyingair, water and fuel will fly on a NASA CLPS mission. As to pilot system which implements technologies for navigation and avoidance of dangerous situations derived from the program ATV — and which is also based on studies of space debris — it is strategic for theautonomy of ESA in the field of lunar exploration. It will be used in particular by theeuropean logistics lander (EL3, European Large Logistics Lander), capable of transporting up to 1.7 tons of cargo to any location on the lunar surface. Thus, Pilot’s navigation camera, dubbed Pilot‑D, will fly and be tested on board a private CLPS mission.

As for Pilot, the complete system, which should allow Luna-25 and Luna 27 to land with very high precision, ESA is considering how to use it on another mission.

In addition, the Director General of ESA and the President of the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) signed an agreement relating to the carriage of the spectrometer of mass ESA’s exospheric (EMS) onboard robot mission mobile lunar Lupex conducted jointly by Jaxa and Isro.

ESA wants to explore the Moon with Russia

Article of Remy Decourt published on 09/13/2016

The lunar exploration program of the European Space Agency, discreet, does exist. ESA should cooperate in three Russian lunar missions, and its role is anything but anecdotal, as Bérengère Houdou, from ESA’s Lunar Exploration Office, explains to us.

Today, the European Space Agency does not hide its lunar ambitions and, in particular, its astonishing vision of a town on the moon. For now, the idea remains vague and is not to be taken literally. “The expression “lunar village” does not mean that we will build houses, schools and a town hall on the Moon”, explained to us recently Franco Bonacina, the spokesperson for the director general of Esa. It’s less about building a city than allowing each partner to bring their own touch to it with different systems and varied missions, and perhaps in several places. While waiting for this village to materialize, the Esa “cooperates with Russia on three missions as part of a partnership with Roscosmos, its space agency”explains Bérengère Houdou, from the lunar exploration office of ESA.

This interest in the Moon is not new. Until 2012, the European Space Agency was working on technologies for a lunar lander robotics, in view of a European mission which was to prepare new manned flights to the Moon in the then near future. The idea at the time was to allow Europe to learn how to land on the surface of our satellite but also on other bodies of the Solar system, “as was the case with the Huygens missionwhich successfully lands on Titan in January 2005, and will be with theSchiaparelli lander of the ExoMars 2016 mission which is to land on the Red Planet in October ». If we go back further in the history of Esa, we will cite the Euromoon 2000 program. It planned, for the year 2000, to land a lander and install a small satellite in orbit to precisely map a region of the pole south with a view to subsequently placing a lunar module there, prefiguring the establishment of an outpost for human exploration. At the time, in 1996, this program took over the concept of the Elspex-2000 mission (European Lunar South Pole Expedition), which the Esa had then abandoned and which planned a landing on the Moon in the summer of 2001.

The Moon in focus

Despite the abandonment of these projects, the ideas remained. Since the arrival in July 2015 of Johann-Dietrich Wörner, the new director of Esa, the attraction of the Moon is stronger than ever within the agency, and the idea of ​​a major lunar exploration which would precede a large-scale exploration of Mars takes shape. This is materialized by a “significant participation in Russia’s robotic lunar program and foresight studies that review future manned exploration scenarios that may succeed the Space station ». This participation in the Russian program takes place in particular through the “supply of the very sophisticated Pilot moon landing system for the Russian Luna-Resource mission Lander (Luna-27), scheduled for launch in 2021, as well as a sample analysis laboratory in situ Prospect anda drill ».

Driver (Precise and Intelligent Landing using Onboard Technologies), that’s his name, “will be capable of a very great autonomy of analysis and decision, never seen before”. This system is designed for precision landing with obstacle detection in order to make accessible sites that are difficult to access, such as the South Pole. With this mission, Russians and Europeans “wish to land in regions never explored in order to draw up an inventory of natural resources which, subsequently, could be used for manned missions”. Pilot will use innovative technologies that will enable real-time field analyses. He will be able to create his own elevation maps and use them during the last minutes of Luna-27’s landing phase. Thereby, “autonomously and without the intervention of ground controllers”, it will determine its own landing field, compatible with the lander taking into account many parameters. For example, up to a few hundred meters in height, it will be able to detect slopes that are too steep and obstacles that are too large, allowing Luna-27 to “reschedule its final trajectory at the last moment”. In the future, if Pilot’s lunar experience proves successful, it could be adapted to the needs of other missions, such as a landing on Ceresthe Nautilus project.

Bring Lunar Samples Back to Earth

Luna-27’s landing site has not yet been chosen, but we know that it will have very special lighting characteristics and will be located at the South Pole. With a light of Sun grazing, combined with the topography of the region dotted with impact craters, the south pole is home to many “illuminated areas, for some, for a large part of the day or, for others, permanently plunged into shadow”.

As for the Prospect laboratory (Platform for Resource Observation and in-Situ Prospecting for Exploration, Commercial exploitation and Transportation), it is a system consisting of a “drill designed to extract samples from the lunar soil to a depth of two meters, possibly at a temperature of -170°C, and scientific instruments to perform their analysis”. This drilling machine will be derived from that of rover ExoMarch 2020 who will use it to take samples of the Martian soil. In a next step, the data from Prospect will help to assess the “feasibility of the use of local resources and, why not, of their commercial exploitation which could interest the private sector”.

Before Luna-27, Russia plans to launch Luna-Glob (Luna-25) in 2019. “It is also a lander but a demonstration, which must show that Russia is capable of landing on the moon in complete safety”. ESA’s contribution to this mission is modest. “She will test the navigation camera which the Pilot system will then use to gently land Luna-27. » This camera, which has no scientific use, will only be used for landing. These pictures will be used by the lander to know where it is in relation to the surface of the Moon.

In the longer term, the European Space Agency has expressed interest in “to participate in a robotic mission to return lunar samples which could be carried out in cooperation with Russia and other partners”. The idea will obviously be to exploit the technical experience of Pilot and Prospect, but also to develop technologies which will make it possible to “bring back samples by keeping them under the temperature conditions in which they were taken”.