Roscosmos plans to develop technologies for landing a spacecraft on an asteroid by 2030, said the head of the state corporation Dmitry Rogozin.
According to him, the main difficulty is how to “catch on to the asteroid”, but Russian specialists have already begun work.
“There is a task – to learn how to land an apparatus on an asteroid, and not a simple spacecraft, but to land a spacecraft … We know how to implement this,” RIA Novosti quotes Rogozin on August 6.
The plans are expected to be implemented by 2030.
To date, spacecraft have already landed on asteroids. So, in 2019, the Japanese landing modules Rover-1A, Rover-1B, MASCOT and the probe of the same name made a soft landing on the asteroid Ryugu.
On July 25, it became known that Russia had found a way to abandon super-heavy rockets when flying to the moon. Thus, the Rocket and Space Corporation Energia has patented a flight scheme to the Moon without using a super-heavy rocket. It is proposed to deliver astronauts to the moon and near-earth orbital station using a reusable manned spacecraft.