Russia, China to cooperate in moon exploration
(AP)
Updated: 2006-09-12 09:41
MOSCOW - Russia will cooperate closely with China on moon exploration and the
two nations could sign space cooperation agreements by the year's end, the
Russian space chief said Monday.
Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov said that Chinese experts had
shown a strong interest in Russia's lunar experience.
"Russia is ready for close cooperation with China in the field," Perminov
said Monday in remarks posted on his agency's Web site. "This is a serious and
quite promising field of cooperation. In the past the Russian-Chinese
cooperation have been mostly limited to the sales of Russian equipment, but now
we are considering the development and implementation of joint projects."
The Soviet Union sent numerous unmanned missions that explored the moon,
including two rovers that studied the moon's surface in 1970-1973. However, it
lost the moon race to the United States, abandoning its manned lunar program
after a series of booster explosions.
Perminov said that the two nations had formalized their plans for the moon
research in a specific action plan approved in June 2005 and followed up on that
with several expert meetings. The latest meeting of Russian and Chinese space
officials took place last week.
"Joint lunar research is our priority," Anatoly Perminov said, according to
the RIA Novosti news agency. He didn't elaborate on specific plans for the moon
research, but said that new agreements on space cooperation could be signed
during Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov's visit to Beijing in the fall.
Perminov also said that China could join Russia's project of sending a probe
to Mars' moon, Phobos, to take samples of Phobos soil and deliver them back to
Earth. The mission is set for 2009.
Russia sold China the technology that formed the basis of its manned space
program, which launched its first astronaut in 2003 and two others in 2005. The
next Chinese manned space flight is due next year. Officials say they also want
to send up a space station and land a robot probe on the Moon by 2010.
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