[Speaking at a meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences,](dzen.ru/a/adTd5Y48PRV-hl70) RAS Vice President Sergey Chernyshev announced three new lunar missions to be launched between 2032 and 2036. While Russia is working with China on the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), it has had several setbacks with the crash of Luna-25 in 2023. Luna-26 is scheduled to be launched in 2027. It will be an orbiter and will support future lander missions by relaying data between the Moon’s surface and Earth, especially for missions on the far side or in polar regions. Luna-27 is scheduled to be launched in 2028 and will land on the Moon’s South Pole, drilling into the soil to investigate its composition and chemistry in order to determine whether these materials could support human missions or even a lunar base. It will also examine dust, plasma, seismic activity, and the interaction with the solar wind .
In addition to these, Chernyshev also announced a new trio of missions, which will be aimed at a transition from single missions to the creation of infrastructure for continuous work on the Moon. These will also assist the planning for the ILRS. Luna-29 will be launched in 2032 and will be a heavy lander designed to deliver a significant amount of cargo to the Moon. Luna-30 will test the capabilities of taking off from the lunar surface. It will test the “jump” capabilities by launching from the Moon, but will not return to Earth. The mission will also include a heavy-duty geologist rover which can travel 500 kilometers on the lunar surface. Luna-28 is scheduled for 2036. It will collect soil samples from the South Pole and return them to Earth. This will be comparable to the Soviet return mission Luna-24 in 1976, but an order of magnitude more difficult. The lunar rovers have been in development at the Russian Academy of Science’s Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, which are also working on a medium-sized robot for exploration and prospecting, one of whose tasks will be to study the distribution, concentration, and chemical composition of volatile components of lunar resources as well as a small rover-geophysicist for a detailed study of a potential lunar base site.
