MOSCOW (AP) – Russia plans to cooperate with China in robotic missions to the moon and Mars and
other space projects, officials said Thursday.
"We have switched from
cooperating on technological elements and devices to developing big scientific
projects in space research,'' Yuri Nosenko, a deputy head of Russia's Federal Space
Agency, told reporters in a televised hookup from Beijing, where he and other
officials were attending a Russian national exhibition.
He said the space-related
contracts Russian companies had signed with China were worth tens of millions
of dollars.
Nosenko said that Russia
had agreed to help China in its lunar research program and China would also
take part in Russia's project of sending an unmanned
probe to Mars' moon, Phobos, to take soil samples and deliver them back to Earth.
China will build a
mini-satellite that would be carried by the Russian probe and released in the
vicinity of Mars to conduct research, said Georgy Polishchuk, the head of the
NPO Lavochkin company, which is working on the mission. It is set to launch in
2009.
Polishchuk said that China
also had expressed interest in joining a later robotic mission expected to land
on Mars.
Nosenko wouldn't elaborate
on specific details of the moon and Mars projects or say how much they would
cost.
Nikolai Testoyedov, the
head of the NPO Reshetnev state-controlled company that built satellites for
Russia's GLONASS global-positioning system, said he expects China to cooperate
with Russia in the field.
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 Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft [image]
closely resembles the Russian Soyuz.
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.
While hailing the bilateral
cooperation with China, Nosenko has scoffed at media allegations that China's
Shenzhou spacecraft could replace Russia's Soyuz to ferry crews to the
international space station. "We are glad to see the successes of our Chinese
colleagues, but it would be extremely difficult to achieve that,'' he said,
adding that Soyuz boasts an excellent safety record that has taken decades to
build.
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