Thursday, August 17, 2023

Russia and India both have moon landers scheduled to land next week

Possibly August 21 for Russia and August 23 for India:

Russia has not landed on the moon since the Soviet days. The last Soviet mission was Luna 24, which launched 47 years ago. Russia's last interplanetary mission, Fobos-Grunt, which aimed to collect samples from Mars' moon Phobos, failed to get out of low Earth orbit in 2011. Luna-25 has been delayed for more than a decade. Engineers also needed to make changes to the landing navigation system late in the spacecraft's development . 


As for India, the country is aiming to join the United States, the former Soviet Union and China as the only nations to perform a soft lunar landing.

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Recent attempts at moon landings by Israeli and Japanese companies have not gone well