ESA and Roscosmos to partner for series of lunar missions

BBC : In five years the European Space Agency (ESA) and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, plan to launch a probe to an unexplored region of the Moon’s southern pole to look for water and the raw materials necessary for making fuel and oxygen. The mission, Luna 27, will be part of a series of missions that will continue where the Soviet Union’s lunar explorations left off in the 1970s. The partnership is part of ESA director Johann-Dietrich Wörner’s stated goal of establishing a base on the far side of the Moon. To do that, sources for water, fuel, and oxygen will need to be found. ESA is currently developing a new landing system that is much more precise than the landers of the 1960s and 1970s. The agency is also providing a drill that will be able to reach depths of 2 m in the hopes of finding layers of ice below the surface and an onboard laboratory similar to the instrument on Philae, which landed on comet 67P last year.