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I thought that it was time to start up a discussion of what we know, or
would like to know, about the Soviet Luna Missions.
To start off, I have heard many a reference to the landing system utilized
by the early landers, such as Luna 9. However, I have yet to find a report,
or even a diagram, that shows the sequence of events, or such details as
the air bags. If such references do not exist, I hope that some of the UMSF
community have Russian contacts that could lead us to the source material
before it ends up in the dust bin of history.
In addition, I heard of an effort several years ago to obtain ALL of the imagery
from Lunakhods 1 and 2. Does anyone know if that effort was able to
secure that data?
Also, as far as Lunas 15, 18 and 23, the sample-return missions that didn't
quite make it home, are there any official reports "out there" that detail what
actually occurred to those missions? Or will we have to wait for the
high-resolution images from the LRO to determine their fates?
Another Phil
We had quite a detailed discussion of the Luna 4 through 13 lander missions in -- of all places -- the "I'm back from the Europa Focus Group meeting" thread down in the "Europa" section (which gives you some idea of how this site tends to wander around erratically from one subject to the next; we got there, somehow, via discussions of a possible lightweight lander design for Europa Orbiter). It turns out that there was an issue of "JBIS" a few years ago that provided extremely detailed information on these missions (plus the Luna 10 through 14 orbiters).
An earlier issue of JBIS detailed the very first Soviet Luna missions (1958 through 1960). I don't know whether there are any issues of that magazine (which does periodic issues on astronautics history, including the Soviet branch) that cover the later Lunas (1969-76), but I wouldn't be surprised. Once again, I'll have to take a look the next time I'm down at UC-Davis.
Luna 23 and Luna 18 were apparently damaged by hard landings. I am just speculating, but perhaps the landing radar was confused by surface boulders and the retros cut out a little early.
Luna 15, I guess they are pretty sure was a sample return, crashed too. Considering the complexity of a sample return, a first attempt (is this known for sure?) might have gone awry in any number of ways. Considering the US Ranger series, (but not the Surveyors!), probably not too surprising.
The http://tinyurl.com/l7d4t website has a good timeline of the Luna probe series, for some of the pictures taken on those missions, http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogMoon.htm, is the best place to look.
Interestingly while Luna 15/18 were lost in crashes, Luna 23 landed with no problems but suffered a drill failure after landing, the Soviets apparently 'ran' the lander for a few days and then shut it down, however no images seem to have been released from the mission. (No pictures were taken by Luna 16 because the floodlights failed to switch on.) It would be interesting to know if any pictures were taken by Luna 23, or whether like Luna 24 the probe did not carry a camera.
Sorry for duplicating ljk-4's links but obviously we were typing at the same time.
This is a follow up to my earlier post (see above). The information on Astronautix.com states that the Soviets continued to operate the lander portions of Luna 16/20/24 (The sample return craft) after the samples were launched towards Earth.
Similarly, the abortive Luna 23 mission also featured a period of lander operation, though in this case it would have been tied to the failed attempt to collect surface material.
It would appear that at least Lunar 16 and 20 were fitted with cameras, but it is unclear if Luna 23 was so equipped. Luna 24 (allegedly) had no cameras fitted.
Does anyone have a listing, rough or otherwise of what other instruments were fitted to the landers and on just how long the landers were operated after launch of the samples?
Following up on a couple of points here... I'm on vacation and away from my usual resources...
The Russians are trying to collect everything and make it available through a website, similar to a PDS node. But they have no money for it. I have been close to the people involved, chiefly Kira B. Shingareva of MIIGAiK and Sasha Basilevsky of Vernadsky. Some material has been collected - big tapes with Lunokhod images from the State Archives, stuff stolen for later sale and now recovered, negatives scanned etc. But getting it all organized is another matter and the lack of money makes it very slow. Some has been done on a volunteer basis. So don't expect results for a long time. What we REALLY need is a philanthropist to put money into it. So email all your philanthropist buddies.
Lunas 15, 16, 18 and 20 plus the failed sample return launches from that period - all had cameras. Don Mitchell describes them on his site, referenced above. Luna 16, it appears now, DID take images. It landed at night and its lights failed, as noted above, but it took pics anyway. But they were mostly black with just a few spots of light from earthshine. They were never published. (This info from Basilevsky via Mitchell). I would dearly love to get my hands on the digital data, and I assume we could do a lot more with it using modern methods than was possible back in 1970. The later sample return missions had no cameras due to having a redesigned drill. The old camera was for targeting the old drill to a rock-free spot. The new drill couldn't be retargeted and also took up the camera's space and mass (I think).
Phil
In the early 1990s, Andrew Lepage wrote in the online EJASA on a series
about the Soviet and US race to the Moon, focusing on then new information
about the lunar probes.
All of the EJASA issues from 1989 to 1996 are online here:
ftp://ftp.seds.org/pub/info/newsletters/ejasa/
Andrew's articles are in these issues:
"Mars 1994" - March 1990
"The Great Moon Race: The Soviet Story, Part One" - December 1990
"The Great Moon Race: The Soviet Story, Part Two" - January 1991
"The Mystery of ZOND 2" - April 1991
"The Great Moon Race: New Findings" - May 1991
"The Great Moon Race: In the Beginning..." - May 1992
"The Great Moon Race: The Commitment" - August 1992
"The Great Moon Race: The Long Road to Success" - September 1992
"Recent Soviet Lunar and Planetary Program Revelations" - May 1993
"The Great Moon Race: The Red Moon" - July 1993
"The Great Moon Race: The Tide Turns" - August 1993
"The Great Moon Race: The Final Lap - November 1993
"A Personal Adventure in Home Computing: The Origin of Comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9" - March 1994
"The Great Moon Race: The Finish Line" - July 1994
If you REALLY like Luna 15 conspiracy theories, Allen Drury -- the Godawful right-wing political-thriller writer who got the Pulitzer for "Advise and Consent" in 1960 only because, after the Pulitzer board had awarded it to Saul Bellow, the newspaper publishers who own the Pulitzer Prize organization decided to take it away from Bellow and award it to Drury for writing an Important Political Novel -- wrote a lulu in 1970 called "The Throne of Saturn", in which Luna 15 was an unsuccessful attempt to bomb the Apollo 11 landing site and kill Armstrong and Aldrin because...because...well, just because.
Hopefully the last word on Luna 15 conspiracies. The rpg magazine Dragon once ran a series of articles adapting the moon to different rpgs. One of these was called 'Zondraker' and dealt with espionage on the moon in a hypothetical 1980's.
One of the scenario outlines had the players visiting the Luna 15 site and discovering that rather than a Luna 16/18/23/24 style lander the probe was in fact a last ditch attempt to put a Cosmonaut on the moon.
Very cool. Where did you find a good picture of frame 35?
I'm still trying to pry more Luna-3 pictures loose. To be honest, they are probably sitting in a drawer, scratched up, covered with dust. But I'm told the magnetic tape still exists, and there is a machine at IKI that can read it. I'm pressing some folks to do that.
I made this figure for my book, just to give people a reference for what they are looking at in the Luna-3 images. The clementine image is a texture-mapped sphere.
[attachment=5474:attachment]
So I guess this means the American Anti-Communist League was wrong. The Russians didn't fake the pictures.
Here is a mosaic of Zond 3 images which I made a while ago. The early images over Oceanus Procelarum can't be fitted to the later ones. I apologise for the image size and quality, but I'm away from home and don't have my usual stuff with me.
Phil
Very impressive.
This Zond image is another favorite of mine from the Soviet archive.
http://img102.imageshack.us/my.php?image=zondearthrise6em.jpg
Thanks so much for posting that!
I've been wanting to see these images for a long time.
I've wanted to play with the Luna 3 images for years, but time, software availability (and time to learn to use it) and....
The original atlas of Luna 3 images had density sliced frames for some of the available images that could be histogram-matched and then merged into one dataset with extended dynamic range and less noise. The bigger part of the restoration would / should exist of removing or reducing periodic noise from the images with Fourier filtering: generate an image of just the periodic noise and subtract it from the raw image. Then further cleanup to remove noise-spike induced salt-and-pepper noise and readout and other artifacts.
Have at it!
The Zone 3 images could be mapped onto a sphere in something like 3 image sets and then registered and mosaiced.
I'd also *LOVE* to see a Zond 3 "movie".... Project each image on to the lunar sphere as viewed by Zond at the time of each image, then keeping the center of the sphere in the center of the frame and letting the sphere diameter vary as it did during the approach and flyby, make an animated gif / mov of the entire flyby with the frames displayed at proportional time intervals
Great Zond-3 mosaics!
To answer you question about Luna-3 transmision modes, the impression I have is that the early transmissions were very noisy, and they got higher quality pictures when the probe came back close to Earth. The images published in Lipsky's atlas are all slow-scan mode. The bands of static are periodic and consistant with the spin rate of Luna-3 (180 sec/rotation) after it finished photography and returned to spin-stabilized orientation. There was a dead spot in the radiation pattern of its antenna.
As far as I know, the only source of Luna-3 and Zond-3 images are prints of Lipsky's exposure-zone photos. I'm still trying to track down a real copy of the photos, and not a printed version. I just heard a few days ago that the Luna-3 magnetic tape is not located in the state archive institute, so we don't know where it is yet. My best guess now is that RNII KP has it.
I've gone off using the FFT method of descreening. What I do now is orient and resize the image so it is a 45 degree screen with exactly 5 pixels per vertical repeat. Then I filter it with a 5x5 custom box filter -- just go into the custom filter section of Photoshop and put a "1" in each box and set the weighting to 25. That box filter gives you a sinc function in the frequency domain, and it kills all the ink-dot harmonics completely. So much so, you can now sharpen the image as much as the noise level allows.
[attachment=5604:attachment] [attachment=5605:attachment] [attachment=5606:attachment]
For the rotation of the image, to make the screen 45 degrees, photoshop is fine. For the rescaling, I prefer to use the Lanczos-windowed sinc filter in ACDSee. There is a mistake in their filter that introduces a phase shift, but doesn't seem to bother too much (ACDSee is so buggy!). When I really care, I have a Kaiser-windowed sinc resampling routine I wrote in C++ that is rock solid.
4th Rock, I am very impressed with your Zond 3 mosaics.
Phil
Thanks all for the info and kind words!
I just found this on the internet: http://selena.sai.msu.ru
At least for me it's a new page!
Don:
Perhaps, in your researches into the Soviet moon probes, you've come across some details which might relate to a subject we previously discussed on here. Bruce Moomaw has managed to persuade us that the hard-landing Luna vehicles used some form of airbags during the landing sequence - an element of that process which was new to most of us! Although it's fairly obvious where the bags must have been (in a splittable 'sock' over the ball of the lander) there are still very few references to just *how* the darn things worked (or didn't).
Have you come across these air-bags, or a landing sequence which refers to them?
Bob Shaw
Interestingly, the Astronautix.com page has a picture of... ...landing bag tests!
So: what exactly happened to the landing bags after, er, landing?
Bob Shaw
One of the cartoons we saw earlier (or at least I saw one, and I think it was on this site) showed the two of them simply being separated from the capsule after landing.
That series of photos of them actually being tested is a neat finding -- I hadn't heard anything about it.
Yes indeed, the Soviets used airbags to land on the Moon. The main craft used an optical horizon and a radar altimeter to control its descent, with a retro rocket. The airbags were inflated, and when a long probe touched the Moon, the airbag was jetisoned. After it came to rest, pyrocharges blew the airbags away from the "automatic lunar station". If you look at the Luna-13 panoramas, you can see pieces of the spacecraft strewn about the landing site:
[attachment=5619:attachment] [attachment=5616:attachment]
When Luna-9 was built by NPO Lavochkin, they used the basic plan of the Luna-5 to 8, but with a couple minor changes. The airbag was inflated later, after the radar and other instruments were jetisoned. Here is a picture of the pre-Luna-9 craft, identifiable because the gas bottle is on the right-side modules, which is ejected a while before landing, to save weight. Most of what you're see when you look at Luna-9 is the engine and its fuel tanks, with some equipment attached to the outside. The oxydizer tank is spherical, and the fuel tank below it is toroidal, typical Russian design esthetics.
[attachment=5617:attachment]
The cone-shaped protrusion on the front of the airbag is also indicitive of Luna-8, some funky extending device on the lander that was absent from Luna-9.
Another difference is that the lander was pressurized in the earlier versions. The cycloramic camera looked out through a periscope inside a cylindrical glass window, somewhat like the Venera-9 camera. On Luna-9, the lander was open to vacuum, and a new higher-resolution camera was designed to operate in a vacuum. In fact, lots of pictures of "Luna-9" are actually pictures of the earlier vehicle. For example, the lander on display at the Engeriya Museum is Luna-8, naturally because they built those. At the Lavochkin Museum you will find the honest-to-god Luna-9. Here is a set of photos of Luna-8 (top row) versus Luna-9 (bottom row):
[attachment=5618:attachment]
The Mars-3 lander was somewhat different. They used a parachute and retro rocket, and the lander was encased in a foam shock absorber that was blasted off after it landed:
[attachment=5620:attachment]
Yeah, we discussed a lot of this over at (of all places) the "I'm back from the Europa Focus Group meeting" slot. Luna 8's airbags were inflated just before the retrorocket started -- but one of them was punctured by a faultily installed bracket, and the resultant gas jet threw the craft into a tumble which its attitude-control jets were unable to overcome. So, as one of the Luna 9 changes, they arranged for its airbags to inflate after the retrorocket had started, on the grounds that its pointable nozzles could emit enough thrust to overcome any attitude disturbances caused by small leaks in the airbags.
The very detailed report on the 1963-68 Soviet lunar missions in the Sept. 2000 JBIS reveals that 1965 marked a "stairstep" progress by the Soviets toward a successful landing -- starting with Luna 5, every mission got a little farther than the last one, only to be stopped by a new malfunction whose existence had been concealed by the earlier occurrence of the previous one.
I suspect that for the Luna-3 data, fourier or wavelet (I've never played with those) processing to remove the fine diagonal noise pattern will probably work better than Don Mitchell's descreening, as it's a periodic ripple pattern, may be multi-spatial-frequency, and there may be larger, lower spatial frequencies in the noise.
Sometimes you have to peel layers of noise from an image like layers of an onion, as one noise removal or reduction may interfere with another. I'd remove the fine periodic noise first, then de-spike the data judiciously, then apply a special single-line filter to each original line of data, measuring it's local standard deviation (say along 1/20'th line) and not smoothing the low noise lines, while progressively median-filtering (tends to preserve edges between different uniform areas) noisier lines more and more as the noise level gets worse. Then you could tackle horozontal and vertical brightness striping.
Don:
Excellent information, thanks! I think I begin to understand, now, thanks to the input you and Bruce gave!
Bob Shaw
Here's a piece from Boris Chertok, describing a failed Luna probe launch in 1960. Pardon my translation skills...
B)-->
Does anyone have images of the Moon produced by the Soviet Luna 19 and Luna 22
lunar orbiters? Wikipedia has images of the vehicles themselves, but no images of the Moon.
Also, it appears that the Luna 19 and 22 orbiters were Lunakhod vehicles with
no wheels, still attached to their propulsion stage.
The Wikipedia entries are as follows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_19
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_22
Another Phil
Back to the Luna 3 images... I wasn't happy with my previous results, because the images had a significant vertical stripe pattern... This prevented the noise reduction filters from working and always found it's way on the final processed images.
So I managed to get rid of it and reprocessed all the avaliable images.
Finally I made a new global mosaic and put a little picture of the spacecraft :-) !
I'm very very happy with this results!
Here you have all of my work: the processed individual frames and the final mosaic
Ricardo:
Great work!
Do you think any of those frames would work as animated .gif files?
Bob Shaw
Beautiful!
Beautiful work. If I ever can get my hands on the photographs or the signal, I will let you know!
I'm assuming that you're starting with the images published by Lipsky in the Atlas I and II, yes?
The Luna 19 and 22 cameras were not great from a scientific point of view. The images were low resolution - Luna 19 aparently better at maybe 50 to 100 m/pixel at the nadir. Luna 22 a bit coarser. But I am not very knowledgeable about the instruments themselves - that's where Don knows much more.
The cameras scanned from horizon to horizon, and (as Shevchenko told me at Sternberg) from terminator to terminator. That may have been the capability, but it's not clear the full-length pans were ever obtained. Maybe only short sections were scanned. The images are fine under the spacecraft but extremely foreshortened at the horizon. Jeanna Rodionova sent me some scans of printed illustrations in which L22 images were reprojected into mapping geometry. I've done some of that too. There were only 5 panoramic images from Luna 19 and 10 from Luna 22. I think of this as experimental imaging, maybe to help design cameras for future planetary missions. It contributes nothing to lunar science and was not adequate for landing site selection.
My big question was: what areas were imaged? (When you're making an atlas, everything looks like a map.) Shevchenko refused to let me copy anything - he showed me negatives of the L22 images, but nothing I didn't later find at Flagstaff and scan for Don. I had the impression they had never mapped coverage themselves. So began a quest - find everything that was published, project it into map form and locate it on a map to create coverage maps for these missions. Don helped me find a few images, I found some for him. We found about five images from each mission, some good, some awful. One I had to scan off a microfilm copy of Izvestiia in our library. There are published statements about the areas imaged by each mission online - they are incorrect.
I think I posted those maps in a remote corner of this forum, if anyone cares to search for them. If I didn't I will soon. Needless to say, this is all going into my book, which is in the final stages of editing now.
Phil
Don, could you please fill in a few more details about Kosmos-60? I knew it was stranded in Earth orbit, but I didn't know it had been able to make lunar observations.
By the way, it's good to have you here!
Phil
PhilHorzempa asked about Luna 19 and Luna 22 images.
Go here:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=1106&hl=luna+22
Phil
There's been quite a lot written recently by Basilevsky about the Venera findings in perspective, and he does indeed agree that what Venera 8 actually detected was a relatively high-silica basalt. In fact, the last I heard, he thought it might very well have landed on one of Venus' numerous "pancake domes", which seem to be made of a particularly viscous lava which is probably therefore silica-rich. Felsic -- that is, granitic or silica-rich -- lava is somewhat paradoxical: it melts at a considerably lower temperature than "mafic" (e.g., basalt-type) lava, but after the latter actually does melt it's far runnier and less viscous than felsic lava.
Here's an updated Zond 3 mosaic. I did some reprojection of the images and was able to expand the coverage a little bit.
I also used the same "de-stripping" processing as in the Luna 3 images do clean the pictures.
A brighness gradient was added in Photoshop, along with some color and a picture of the spacecraft.
Looks nice ;-)
Wow! Great work!
Is that the eastern rim of the South Pole-Aitken basin I can see to the left of Orientale?
I think that has to be the first Russian image where I have actually been able to tell what I was looking at. Great work!!
Check this out - a scale model of Luna 24 complete with actual lunar surface
samples attached to the base:
http://www.maxuta.biz/luna_24_soil/
It was a gift to some guy named Leonid Brezhnev for his 70th birthday in 1976.
And it's actually a model of the Luna 16-20 versions, but what the hey.
I have looked through this thread and other Luna threads on UMSF, but have
not found any "official" explanation of what happened to the Sample-Return missions
that didn't return, i.e., Lunas 15, 18 and 23. I have heard the usual stories
about the end of each of these missions.
However, do we really KNOW what happened to Lunas 15, 18 and 23?
For example, we have all read that Luna 15 crashed while attempting to land in July 1969.
However, why did it crash? Was it hardware, software, terrain?
The same goes for Luna 18 and Luna 23. Did Luna 18 actually crash, and if so,
then why? Was it descending too rapidly?
As for Luna 23, the "official" explanation for its lack of return is that
the drill mechanism was damaged. Was this a cover story meant to hide some
engineering embarrassment such as an ascent engine that would not ignite?
Another Phil
The wealth of information is in Russian. There are textbooks that describe how rocket and radio telemetry systems work in detail, there are biographies, collections of all of Korolev's memos, thousands of scientific journal papers about individual experiements -- some are translated in Cosmic Research but many are not, especially the earlier ones. I have two file cabinets filled with journal papers.
There is no royal road I guess. But if you can read Russian, start with Boris Chertok's four books. The first of them has been translated into English already, and the rest will be eventually. In English, I would absolutely recommend reading Asif Siddiqi's two volumes, but it is mostly about the manned space programs. There just isn't a good comprehensive work on Soviet unmanned probes in English or Russian. Basically taht's what I've been up to, for the Venus probes, writing a book.
The only thing you cannot find in writing is information about the very early MV, 2MV and 3MV experiments. I've relied mostly on interviews with the few remaining scientists for that, in particular Lebedinsky's young assistants.
I wouldn't bank on conspiracy theories and "cover stories" by the way. I see little evidence for that. The soviets often said nothing about a flight, but I know of no case where their scientists lied.
I have just made a polar pan of Luna 13's landing site - here it is:
Cool...I did something similar with Luna-9 a while back. However, I never recentered it, so it has the same problems as the original pan. It helps to get a feel for the site, considering the way the tilt of the spacecraft effects the appearance of the panoramas.
Very cool. Can't wait to see your book, Phil.
Thanks. Book update: It's finished. The last entries were the SMART-1 impact and a comment on LCROSS targets. I'm getting a foreword written by - a well-known person - as the last thing to plug in. I am trying to nail down the last permissions to publish material - from Russia (Don will understand that). Some of my colleagues here on UMSF get a big thank-you in the acknowledgements. Then it's file formatting time, and off to the Publisher in November.
All this would be fine if I hadn't been asked to write something for the History of Cartography project as well! - in the same time frame. And you can't turn down a request like that.
Phil
Here's the Luna 9 counterpart. A rougher landscape. But you can see the pan covers about 2/3 of the horizon, and large (Taurus-Littrow scale) mountains are not visible. The point usually indicated as the landing point has to be wrong for that reason. The landing site must be further north, out on the mare surface.
Phil
"I'd like to thank the members of UMSF without whom this book would have been finished a good deal sooner"
Doug
Don - just Word. Cambridge does all the page setup, I provide unformatted text and 400 separate image files!
Phil
Phil,
Is there any chance you would consider authoring a book on small Solar System bodies at some point in the future? From Phobos and Deimos, to the co-orbital moons of Saturn, I'm sure it would be a fascinating read!
Ian.
Oddly enough I have considered that. But unfortunately I want to do more than anyone can do in a lifetime, and I don't know if that one will get done. My next plan is Venus and Mars...
Phil
Need an extra writer for some utility work? I'm free after Sept 2007 once my master's degree is done...still gonna be in writing mode after my thesis is complete.
Phil... absolutely INSIST on final galley proofs.
My brother had an article published in the book in Solar Power Satellites, edited by Dr. Peter Glaser (inventor of the SPS idea), published (I think) by Elsevier. He sent his editor a "contingency copy" labled "do not publish", just in case some catastrophy prevented him from making the submission deadline.
He then submitted the final copy, on time, with extensive improvement and additions to some parts (a month's work).
They didn't send galley proofs. Said they weren't needed... (where nothing can go worng, Worng, WORNG!)
They published the WRONG VERSION
The CHOPPED THE TITLE HEADERS OFF ALL HIS GRAPHS AND FIGURES, and didn't include them in the captions.
He's still screaming.. years later. <almost>
Good point, ed... and thanks everyone for your support.
Phil
I hope that the Luna 16 and 24 panoramas are in there. Don't give me the little "It landed on the night side" and "It didn't have a camera" arguments. Seeing what you have pulled out of the Surveyor images, you should be able to find your way around this pretty well.
Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, there are rumored to be some scans from Luna 16 in which a few vague features can be seen, probably in earthshine. But I have never seen these, and my source, one of the Russian scientists, was not reliable (not in the sense that he was lying, but in the sense that he said that he was pretty sure the scans he was talking about were from Luna 16, but he wasn't sure, and had no idea whether those scans, if they do indeed exist, might be today).
Don Mitchell also reported that information about the Luna 16 image. I would love to get my hands on the Luna 16 image data - with modern methods we UMSF types could perform miracles with it. But whether we could ever find them ... who can say? I've been invited to write a paper for "Russian Cosmonautics" and I might have to use it to promote the historical value of finding these things...
Phil
Did you have any luck digging up Luna-20 imagery? I have some, but it my scans are of the same images as Don Mitchell's. I am hoping there is a more complete pan out there somewhere.
Didn't one of the Luna sample return missions land hard and damage it's sampling arm, but continued to work on the lunar surface before the batteries ran down or something? Did that one get any images?.. #18 or #20 or so?... One of the three <?> that tried to get samples in the highlands south of Crisium?
Lunas 15, 16, 18 and 20 carried twin cameras mounted on either side of the hinged sampling mechanism, to provide a stereo view of the sampling area. Each camera viewed a strip extending from the sampling area to the horizon on its side of the sampler. By combining the two you could get a full pan.
Alas - 15 crashed, 16 landed at night (and its lights failed), 18 crashed... but 20 did return images. I have several, including a tiny fragment of a pre-sampling image, and two views after sampling, as well as both horizon fragments.
After that the drill was redesigned - being out on a hinged arm it couldn't apply enough pressure to work effectively. The new drill was bolted to the side of the vehicle. Its extra weight meant the camera had to be removed. Also the old drill could swing sideways a bit to avoid a rock if needed, hence the value of a camera to look for hazards, but it wasn't needed with this fixed drill. Luna 23 landed hard and couldn't drill... but there was no camera. Luna 24 worked, but no camera.
Phil
I was told by Arnold Selivanov that Luna-16 returned images with a few bright objects visible. Unlike the Venus/Mars missions, the Lunar images were transmitted as an analog video signal, and I seriuosly doubt that those tapes could be found or read today.
My guess is they were not published, but film recordings were made and are in someone's drawer at RNII KP, scratched up and gathering dust.
Hi,
I recently encountered a Polish space encyclopedia titled "Copernicus, Astronomy, Astronautics" which contained a colour picture of Earth above Moon's horizon from Zond spacecraft, similar to the one recently reprocessed here. But what really caught my attention was information on Luna 15 spacecraft, which coincided with Apollo 11 landing on the Moon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15
It states apolune of Luna 15 was 110 km, similar to that of the orbital module of Apollo 11 - so was there any collision hazard issue there? I was also wondering, could it actually be sighted by astronauts on the ground? And if not, did any other astronauts during other Apollo missions actually observe artifical satellites circling the Moon at that time?
Regards,
Karol P.
Edit:
The Polish Wikipedia entry:
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81unochod
states that a launcher carrying a Lunokhod even before Lunokhod 1, designated Lunokhod 201, crashed soon after lift off on Februray 19, 1969 indicating an abvious attempt by the Soviets to place a rover on the Moon before the American manned mission. So was it really a theme of interference with Apollo and stealing the publicity even though their manned Lunar program collapsed?
Hello:) From Ural with cosmic love, special 4 us, who has not forgotten and esteems the Russian astronautics:
http://pq.vp.video.l.google.com/videodownload?version=0&secureurl=twAAAIbiH2VZrdNnoQDYc55OvOENAsx8ZszR0A22lQ78Njs0F2ui-VDj0Kyq44i68s5e_eJGxYQ5uHTI6j4Y3pLCNoqVoHO0IbX1rQR5g2IqrfPtjT8u7aFqdThL46Wtzyxiny11wI6umqehNjMZn4XmrZg2xCi5vj0YK6pF6Ikx3NPHIHvRe-sKkcgkRi6tftdmT5M3-zG-huAi5T05DX7TqyGGN5is7nUxDelARxjPqTzV8dCrCTrBfpqJ54w66lZHg&sigh=NHkNik2iQs_5uImL-EIty1XnKpc&begin=0&len=828880&docid=-6548940678861579894&rdc=1/Transmashdocumentary.mp4
about Marsokhod
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Regarding the Luna 16, 20, and 24 sample returns, does anyone have solid verifiable information about the mass or physical size of the upper part that launched off the moon? I have seen conflicting information that the earth entry capsule (the sphere at the top) was anywhere between 1 foot and 3 feet in diameter. Anything more accurate and verifiable would be much appreciated. Has anyone been to the NPO Lavochkin Museum where the sample return capsules are (or were) on display?
Below is some information about how the Luna ascent vehicles worked:
It was functionally very simple engineering, tailored to the particular physical situation. The moon's small size (compared to Mars) permitted a direct return. Not going into lunar orbit meant no circularization (orbit insertion) burn, and the fact that the target (earth) was gravitationally large and nearby meant no midcourse corrections either. No need for any engine restarts or staging. A single propulsive burn from the 1-stage ascent vehicle was simply timed (both moment of launch relative to the calendar, and burn duration).
Guidance consisted of flying a vertical trajectory off the moon. The vernier engines were controlled by a local vertical sensor, a pendulum! Site selection was limited to the east side of the moon, where a vertical ascent reduced the geocentric velocity compared to the moon's, so it was effectively just a deorbit burn with respect to the earth. Velocity would have been less than lunar escape velocity, since the earth was sitting there pulling it home. The return stage had a transmitter that could be switched on and off by commands from earth, and the resulting signals received on earth were used to predict the landing point accurately enough to go out and find it.
All this is explained in a paper by Boris Girshovich, presented at the National Space Society's 26th International Space Development Conference, Dallas Texas 2007May25-28. See isdc.nss.org/2007/index.html.
Also I found an online paper in the Electronic Journal of the Astronomical Society of the Atlantic, Vol. 7, Nr. 1, Jan 1996, by Andrew J. LePage. He points out that the return capusle was essentially just falling almost straight toward earth, and notes that they had to land near 56 degrees east longitude on the moon, in order to make the simplified return scheme work. The ascent vehicle is said to be 520 kg total, roughly 300 kg of which would have to be expended propellant. The sample return capsule is described as 40 kg total and 50 cm in diameter, which suggests that the "3 feet" diameter noted by the Girshovich paper is a typo.
John W.
The capsule was certainly not 3 feet in diameter. The overall width of the full craft including legs was about 3.3m diameter, and from images you can gauge the small size of the capsule. Here it is said to be 25 cm dimater, which seems about right to me...
http://www.astronautix.com/project/luna.htm
I checked today the old broken link, and met me a nice surprise.
http://planetology.ru/panoramas/lunokhod2.php?language=english
I wish you all a pleasant evening.
Crater Le Monnier viewed from Apollo
I wonder what prompted this release?
They have been talking about this for years. When I was in Russia I heard stories of finding the tapes in the State archives and carring them back on public transit to the institute. Then the tape reader would only operate in the winter, it got too hot in the summer (I think it was that way round). And they also spoke of setting up the equivalent of a PDS node to distribute their old data. Lack of funding delayed it for years. Maybe this is the start of it.
Warning: at least some, probably all, raw Lunokhod panoramas are reversed left to right. If you try to match topographic features you have to flip them.
Phil
What a nice surprise! I can't wait to try to match the panoramas to the traverse maps ;-) It would also be nice to see them on Google Moon.
The only thing I don't like is that the images are water marked. That will make further processing difficult.
Panoramas 12 and 13 in that link (click page 3) seem to form an almost perfect stereo pair. Both are centered at the lander, and so after some basic adjustments I was able to produce this stereo pair of it in 40% of the original size, for crossed-eyes viewing.
That is fantastic, marswiggle, thanks a million. Would it be worth doing the left-right flip Phil mentioned to make that 3D even more like the real thing? (I may try that if I can find out how.)
Fantastic stuff - I'm showing my age, no doubt, but I get quite the nostalgic glow at that peculiarly Soviet-era Russian low-contrast shades-of-grey style of images; it would be really nice if there was any way to extract sharper versions from the images as released (although I doubt that's practical.) Also really cool to see rover tracks on a surface other than Mars
I wonder if there's any way to communicate our collective delight and gratitude for this release back to those responsible?
Yes, that is Alexander (Sasha) Basilevsky, a veteran of planetary science in Russia. He worked on Lunokhod, as well as helping plan human landing sites before the Soviet lunar landing program was cancelled.
Phil
Wow, these images are incredible.
Imagine if we (UMSF) could get a hold of the raw images and reprocess them.
Very cool project indeed
I thought I'd have a play with one image just to clean it up and 'artistically' fill in some gaps.
Please, oh, please someone release the full, un-watermarked images to us.
1) artistic clean-up
Wow Astro0 that is an absolutely stunning image once its cleaned up! I'm going right back up this thread to do my own data 'suckage'
I always wondered what panoramas from this potentially spectacular part of the Moon would look like, without really expecting to ever see much of this dataset. And now we can!
P
Can anyone tell us how far away and how high those mountains are ?
Thanks.
Different parts of the rim of Le Monnier crater are visible in different images. The prominent highlands in some of the early views are Le Monnier Alpha, the southwestern part of the rim of the crater facing into Mare Serentiatis. They are 30 km away and (from this map:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LM/lm42/150dpi.jpg
about 1200 m high.
See also this earlier version of the map which names the hill:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LAC/lac42/150dpi.jpg
Phil
Really impressive work, Astro0. The expresion "artistic clean-up" seems quite reductive to me because, apart from the two vertical dark bands and the shadowed spacecraft portion, it seems quite rigorous... A question: where did you take the spacecraft details in the left portion? (they seems completely black in the original image!)
Dilo asked: Where did you take the spacecraft details in the left portion?
I pulled it out of another panorama in this set of wonderful images.
stevesliva asked: How common is regolith that looks more like gravel like this?
As Gsnorgathon said, I think it's more to do with the lowres/lowcontrast image presented here.
In the full version the surface is typical of the fine regolith and distribution of rocks seen elsewhere.
Thanks for the answer, Astro0.
I checked today link to "Laboratory for comparative planetology", and again met me a nice surprise.
http://planetology.ru/panoramas/?language=english
I had never noticed that many of the side camera panoramic scans feature also at their edges the circular solar panel/bathtub cover
I just got a few diagrams from Sasha Basilevsky that might help us figure out the nature of the geometric distortion in the Lunokhod panoramas...can anyone help me figure out which of the cameras on the diagrams is (are) the one(s) that produced the posted panoramas?
I'm pretty sure the last one was used, but I am not 100% sure.
So does that mean
- they had a 30 degree field of view, covering elevations from 0 to minus 30 degrees at the center of the view?
- they panned on an axis tilted 15 degrees down from horizontal, so if they rotated 90 degrees to one side, they'd cover elevations of (slightly less than) +15 to -15 degrees?
- the panoramic cameras were on the two sides of the rover, positioned 10 degrees toward the rear?
- if the last is true, and if they cover 180 degrees side to side, then the panoramas from the two cameras should overlap in back of the rover but not in front, where there were stereo cameras mounted?
The overlap area at the back, if any, is probably lost behind the rover body at the end of the pan.
A few pans show a round object with a concentric pattern on it - that's the top of the side-looking panoramic camera seen by the fore-and-aft-looking camera just above it, where it was looking downwards at the middle of its view.
Phil
This is a comparison of one of the new Lunokhod 1 panoramas with a Lunar Orbiter mosaic (courtesy our pals at Google). Parts of the highlands west of Promontorium Heraclides are visible on the horizon. I can't be certain yet that this match is right but it looks pretty good.
Phil
I'd been wondering if anyone was working on this since first seeing that spectacular skyline. That looks pretty convincing, right down to one of the pair of little craters in the gap between mountains just left of centre in the panorama.
Information for those who know Russian language. Two interesting monographs are available online:
Peredvizhnaya Laboratoriya na Lune Lunokhod-1. Tom 1. (Mobile Laboratory Lunokhod-1 on the Moon. Vol.1.). 1971. Ed.: Vinogradov, A. P. Moscow, Nauka. 128 p. (In Russian) (166 MB)
Peredvizhnaya Laboratoriya na Lune Lunokhod-1 . Tom 2. (Mobile Laboratory Lunokhod-1 on the Moon. Vol.2.). 1978. Ed.: Barsukov, V. L. Moscow, Nauka. 183 p. (In Russian) (130 MB)
http://planetology.ru/panoramas/materials.php?language=english
THANKS!!!!!
The mirror image business complicates all interpretations of the Luna and Lunokhod images. I first became aware of it when I compared Lunokhod panoramas with maps of small areas in those Lunokhod books linkled just above - they only made sense if the panoramas were reversed. But the Luna 9 and 13 panoramas are not reversed relative to their site plans. So what's the story with everything else? I reversed the Luna 20 panorama because the two end sections had to point in specified directions, but the middle section is not so certain. I drew my plan of the Luna 21 landing site backwards by mistake (compared with the LRO image now available) for this reason. An unambiguous statement from Russian colleagues would be very useful!
Phil
Close up of the dril hole area, from a better photo supplied by Dave Harland.
The presumed hole is the black spot in center. Or perhaps more accurately, the white oval ring around it is the diameter of the hole, and the black patch is the far wall of the hole in shadow.
I made mosaics with the fragments I could find. I had a version I posted once upon a time that extended to the horizon on the right, but I was less than sure that I had connected those images correctly, so I made a separate panorama out of them (the last image in the blog post). http://planetimages.blogspot.com/2010/03/luna-20.html
Very nice panos. The pair on your blog illustrate the ability of the arm to move left-right (in azimuth) and both shots are seen to have been made post-drilling - assuming Smolders was correct in 1973, and his white box does indeed enclose the hole. Phil's atlas has a nice photo which convincingly shows the same area before drilling, and it looks quite different.
Kenny asked me this question privately, but I thought the answer might be of more general interest so (if you'll forgive me, Kenny) I will post it here.
I tried to identify the Luna 20 landing site in my lunar atlas, based on a proposed match between the surface images and Lunar Orbiter images. It was the same position suggested earlier by George Burba. Kenny asked how far I was from the LROC position. I hadn't checked, so here is my answer after a careful comparison of the images. I was about 7 km out! That is comparable to the uncertainties at most lunar sites until you can narrow it down with images. Needless to say, my image analysis was off, and I will have to go back into the pictures and try to figure out why. Oh well, at least I tried!
Phil
I suppose this is as good a place as any to ask; has Luna 2's impact site been seen by LRO, or is it even possible? A search didn't tell much, it would be nice to see the oldest artificial crater on another object (1959)!
Hasn't been found as far as I know, and I would not be surprised if it's location is highly uncertain.
No problem re Luna 20, Phil. Rather than post it publicly initially, I was giving you some thinking time!
Your 2007 position was a really good interpretation from the somewhat fuzzy horizon hills, I thought. And the main error was in range to the horizon, so the analysis of the skyline was pretty spot-on.
Good detective work updated by new data. It's so fascinating to see all this stuff emerge from its previous obscurity.
Looking ahead to the next Russian missions...
Check out these presentations on Luna-Glob and Luna-Resource site selection!
Phil
http://www.iki.rssi.ru/conf/2011-lg/presentations/
apparently a tiny Luna 16 sample is to be auctioned, if you have a spare million...
https://www.rferl.org/a/moon-rocks-collected-soviet-unmanned-space-mission-luna-16-expected-fetch-1-million-dollars-at-auction-sothebys-new-york/29574237.html
the article does not mention it, but I remember a similar sample from Luna 20 being auctioned in the early 1990s.
Some good news about Russia's Luna 25, that it's still on-track for an October 1, 2021 launch.
http://en.roscosmos.ru/21544/
check out this Roskosmos release for the 50th anniversary of Luna 16 last September!
lots of documents, images and videos (I had never seen the details of how the sampling system really worked shown in the 2nd video)
https://www.roscosmos.ru/29219/
video links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFyQZz9BPVg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-qVNnQDRio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2-g0qGOo8
I have grabbed from one of the videos in the previous post four Luna 12 images. I have checked my references, and I am not sure that these have been published before. Maybe Phil Stooke can confirm this.
Interesting! They seem new to me, but the first has vertical lines which look a bit like the framelets in Lunar Orbiter images. I will have to give this some thought. They were shot on film and scanned and transmitted like the Luna 3 (and Lunar Orbiter) images.
EDIT: OK, now I am a bit suspicious. First, the video clearly uses at least one Lunar Orbiter image, the famous "Picture of the Century" oblique view across Copernicus crater. That was Lunar Orbiter 2 which flew after Luna 12, so the video date must be later than that.
Second - look at image 3 from Paolo. 4 horizontal dark lines separate the image into 3 horizontal bands with a bit extra top and bottom, Within each band are vertical fainter light and dark lines. Those look very much like Lunar Orbiter image features (framelet boundaries and scan lines) and are not obvious in the four Luna 12 images I have seen and included in my old atlas. (See also http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogMoon.htm). I will acknowledge that there are very faint markings a bit like that in those Luna 12 images, but nothing like as clear as in Lunar Orbiter images. On the other hand the lighting in the third image shows that the framelets run north-south which limits it to lunar Orbiter 4 and 5. It's all a bit confusing. Also why is the time stamp not using a Cyrillic 'L'?
At the moment I don't know what to think. I certainly don't have time to search through all 2500 Lunar Orbiter images to try to find them! So I will just say I am confused. If anyone looks at Lunar Orbiter images now, note that modern processing has removed many of these artifacts, so you really need to look at older prints or scans.
Phil
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