The Global Race for the 7th Continent: The Moon | Sciences

The Moon will be the seventh continent on Earth, and the only one whose riches and resources have not yet been conquered and exploited. This idea, formulated more than half a century ago in the Soviet Union (the Russians consider Eurasia to be a single continent), has been revived with the imminent arrival of the first expeditions to the satellite’s South Pole. Here, the alien powers will compete for the new lunar gold: water.

Russia was expecting its own investigation Moon 25And This country’s first launch to the Moon in more than 40 years, it landed between August 21-24. the Chandrayaan-3 of India will land on the moon in the 23rd or 24th. The two countries will compete for first place in a matter of days or even hours.

“We hope to arrive on the 21st,” Yury Borisov, head of the Russian Space Agency, said in a statement reported to Reuters. The descent on the pole will be completely automatic, and a lot depends on the rover’s arrival in the predetermined area, which is not very surprising. “I am confident that we will have a smooth and accurate landing and we will be the first to arrive,” Borisov added.

The main advantage for Russia is that its ship is ready to hold out in the hostile Antarctic for a year or more. The ship will remain stationary at its landing point, north of the Bogolawski crater, which has a diameter of 97 kilometers and is where water is most likely to be found.

“If there is water ice on the upper layer of the lunar surface near the landing site, the scientific instruments on board Moon 25 Olga Zakotnaya, spokeswoman for the Russian Institute for Space Research (IKI), which is responsible for the scientific part of the mission, confirmed. “However, even in its polar regions, our satellite is a very dry place compared to Earth,” he continues. Russian LEND tool on board [la sonda orbital] LRO NASA has shown that the water content in the upper layer of the surface, up to a meter deep, does not exceed 5% by weight, but only in the areas richest in water. The average content is lower and the areas with the greatest presence of water are unevenly distributed.” This poses significant challenges for the future on how to harness that water to generate hydrogen for fuel, oxygen for breathing, and water.

if it was Moon 25 It managed to land successfully, and the trials will begin immediately, but results will take between four and six months, Zakotnaya explains. The ship must hibernate during the cold lunar nights, which last just over 14 Earth days. These results will also provide another key piece of information. “Lunar dust is extremely harmful to both robotic probes and future astronauts, so with the data from this mission, we will develop plans to combat its impact,” highlights an IKI spokesperson. Russia plans to send back-to-back robotic missions to Antarctica to lay the groundwork for the arrival of astronauts, a project that Putin’s government has not yet approved.

India can be seen as David fighting the Eurasian Goliath. your ship Chandrayaan-3 It carries fewer scientific instruments and will only last until sunset after the first lunar day. Unlike Russia, which has already managed to land a robotic spacecraft on the satellite, India is emerging from a fiasco Vikram, A lander was traveling on the orbiter Chandrayaan-2 in 2019 and failed to land successfully. Officials at the Indian Aerospace Exploration Agency (ISRO) say they have learned from their mistakes and hope this time the spacecraft will land successfully at a speed comparable to that of a walking person. Its great asset is that it has on board Bragyan (wisdom in Sanskrit), a small mobile vehicle that allows you to explore the environment near the Antarctic landing point, analyzing the composition of soils and rocks.

The Indian Space Agency stated that there are already six orbital probes in use on the moon and two more abandoned, and that Chandrayaan-2 He had already had to perform three maneuvers to avoid collisions with other ships. The Indians hope that as the moon fills with more ships, both public and private, coordination will be more urgent to avoid “risks”.

Just as Russia and India are vying to be the first to land on the pole, Japan will join the race by launching its mission. Medium build, a small device developed by the Japanese Space Agency that is scheduled to lift off on August 26. In this case, your goal is to land far from the pole, in the satellite’s equatorial regions.

The highlight of this moon gold rush will come with the landing of the United States and its allies. This week, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson held a press conference that seemed designed to counter the launch schedule of the Russian mission. Moon 25, was successfully implemented on Friday. His main message was that of manned mission dates Artemis 2 And 3 Still quite fit, despite the fact that the rocket is for one of them, and it is Starship From SpaceX, it took to the air for its first test run. Artemis 2, with a crew of three Americans and one Canadian, will leave at the end of 2024 to fly over the moon. The next event, scheduled for December 2025, will be led by the first non-white woman and man to set foot on the surface of the South Pole, 50 years after the first manned mission to the satellite.

There is a space race, Nelson asserts, although its competition is not Russia or India, but China. “I don’t want China to get to the South Pole before us and say, ‘This is for us, don’t come here,’” the former congressman explained. With the Artemis Accords, the United States is establishing itself as a global arbiter that will monitor access for all signatories, 28 countries, including In that Spain, to the resources of the Moon. Despite the Ukraine war and his distance from Putin’s regime, Nelson was surprisingly supportive of Russia. He said about it: “We wish them well.” Moon 25.

In 2024, NASA also hopes to launch several robotic missions, including a rover Mobile Exploration, paving the way for the astronauts and Artemis Base Camp, the first human settlement on the south pole of the Moon. From here, the astronauts will explore the environment using different vehicles adapted for the mission, first for days and then for weeks. It will be the beginning of the public and private projects that will be developed this decade and that will begin to exploit the water and minerals on the Moon. The lunar surface and orbital bases will be the training sites for future missions to Mars, with a one-way trip lasting a year.

Veteran Russian scientist Mikhail Marov, who specializes in the exploration of the solar system, recently expressed a brilliant idea, although it is somewhat out of touch with the current geopolitical climate. “112 years ago, in 1911, I began studying the Earth’s South Pole,” he wrote in a special issue of the magazine. Astronomical Bulletin dedicated to Moon 25. “Half a century later, Antarctica is home to several thousand people from about 30 countries, who are constantly conducting large-scale scientific research there. In modern times, the beginning of the development of the south pole of the Moon may become an analogue of this process.

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