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These announcements come on the heels of the cancellation of the ExoMars mission, which was set to launch this year as well.
The Luna-25 mission was scheduled to photograph the lunar topography with a European Pilot-D camera constructed specifically for landing in August 2022, with the data being utilised for high-precision landings on the Moon utilising European technology in the future.
The Luna-26 orbiter (2024) was scheduled to launch into lunar orbit two years after Luna-25, for remote scientific observations and as a possible communications relay for the next landing mission, sending data back to ground stations on Earth, including ESA’s ground station network.
And then the Luna-27 lander was be launched (20225) one year after Luna-26 and fly to a challenging landing site closer to the lunar south pole using a European system called Pilot as its main navigation system.
“The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the resulting sanctions put in place represent a fundamental change of circumstances and make it impossible for ESA to implement the planned lunar cooperation. However, ESA’s science and technology for these missions remains of vital importance.”
ESA’s latest statement said:
“A second flight opportunity has already been secured on board a NASA-led Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission for the PROSPECT lunar drill and volatile analysis package (originally planned for Luna-27). An alternative flight opportunity to test the ESA navigation camera known as PILOT-D (originally planned for Luna-25) is already being procured from a commercial service provider.”
It said it is investigating a way forward for the PILOT precision landing and hazard avoidance technology. This capability is needed for European Lunar exploration activities, it said, such as the European Large Logistic Lander (EL3).
Note that ESA and the Japanese agency, JAXA, last week signed an agreement to fly ESA’s EMS-L, the Exospheric Mass Spectrometer instrument, on board the JAXA/ISRO LUPEX lunar rover mission. The organisation had announced in February that it would be implementing international sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.
ExoMars As mentioned, back in Mid-March the ESA announced it would suspend its ExoMars mission, in cooperation with Roscosmos, due to Ukraine war. It said it was suspending ongoing cooperation with the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos on the ExoMars rover mission, the second-half of which which was planned to launch this year.
The joint ESA-Russian mission features the ExoMars rover, which was to be the first rover used to directly search for life on Mars. All the elements of the ExoMars Rover mission (the launcher, carrier module, descent module and Rosalind Franklin rover) had passed their flight readiness reviews. Now a “fast-track industrial study”, led by Thales Alenia Space of Italy, is looking to better define the available options to implement the rover mission.
Also, at the beginning of March, fallout from the Ukraine invasion blocked OneWeb satellite launches from the Russian-operated Baikonur spaceport. OneWeb has since turned to SpaceX as an alternative to launch its LEO satellites.