MOSCOW, December 29. /TASS/. Russia’s space agency Roscosmos and China National Space Administration (CNSA) inked a deal in November this year stipulating bilateral space cooperation in 2023-2027, Roscosmos said in a statement on Thursday.

This year, Russia and China continued closer interaction in the space sphere, Roscosmos stressed.

"On November 25, Roscosmos and China National Space Administration signed a program of space cooperation for 2023-2027," the statement reads.

According to Roscosmos, on the same day the governments of Russia and China signed an agreement on cooperation in creating an international scientific lunar station, as announced earlier by Roscosmos Chief Yury Borisov. Russia and China also inked a cooperation deal on mutually supplementing the Glonass and BeiDou global satellite navigation systems.

"In September, contracts were signed on mutually accommodating Glonass and BeiDou ground stations, for which three Russian measuring stations will be built in the Chinese cities of Changchun, Urumqi and Shanghai and three Chinese stations in the Russian cities of Obninsk, Irkutsk and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky," Roscosmos said.

Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos and China National Space Administration (CNSA) unveiled a roadmap for an international scientific lunar station at the Global Space Exploration Conference 2021 (GLEX 2021) in St. Petersburg in June 2021.

Under the roadmap, the construction of the lunar station is expected to be completed by 2035. Two missions are planned in 2026-2030 to test the technologies of landing and cargo delivery and the transportation of lunar soil samples to Earth. The plans envisage developing infrastructure in orbit and on the Moon’s surface in 2031-2035, in particular, communications systems, electrical power, research and other equipment.

Pursuant to the roadmap, the station’s transportation infrastructure will include research and service lunar rovers and also a hopping robot. The participating sides are also planning to equip the station with several smart mini-rovers to explore the surface of the Earth’s natural satellite.