Russia will launch its first major mission to the Moon, Luna-Glob, in 2012 after a 30-year break from lunar exploration, a space agency spokesman said Thursday.

Russia, a pioneer in robotic lunar research, abandoned its lunar exploration program with the end of the Moon race in the mid-1970s, but the idea of exploring the Earth's natural satellite has been revisited recently, due to ambitious international projects to develop the Moon's resources and to use it as a stepping-stone for further space exploration.

Igor Panarin, press secretary of Roskosmos, said the unmanned flight will include a lunar orbiter that will fire 12 penetrators across diverse regions of the Moon to create a seismic network, which will be used to study the Moon's origin.

After firing the penetrators, the mother ship will deliver a polar station, equipped with a mass spectrometer and neutron spectrometer, to the surface.

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