If you go to 'my controls' top right, and then go to 'manage my attachments'
(I think a direct link would be http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...rCP&CODE=attach )

You can see it all there

Doug

Thanks, Doug!
So we can delete our attachments... at this point, what about max individual amount allowed? (if any)

It says what your limit is on that page.


Doug

O.K. I have 'scaled down' a nice Mariner I photo as an example

A good view, but the photo itself is oddly pixelated and jaggy. What is the source?

Ha Don ... the source is my personal collection of old NASA spacecraft photos ... I've scanned this photo as a 'colour' picture on my scanner which gave it a purple tone

Anyway... as we're searching the manufacturer of the Atlas-Agena shroud for Mariner 1964, I'm adding a photo of it here ...

Looks like you have a great collection of photos. Thanks for sharing some of them!

Well, since this is supposed to be a thread about posting genuine spacecraft photos, let's do that. Here are some first and second-generation Soviet Luna probes which I believe are actual or very close to actual:

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These probes were built by OKB-1, and the only really authentic displays are found in the Museum of the Cosmic Rocket Corporation now. They are often mislabeled though. The first image is the internals of Luna-1 (labeled as internals of Luna-3 which is incorrect). The two green boxes seen on the top are the NaI scintillator and its electronics unit, built by Vernov. The middle section is mostly silver-zinc batteries. The spherical container for one of the Soviet pennant balls is seen near the bottom.

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Next we see a photo of Luna-1 (bad models have obviouly fake instruments stuck on the outside, but these look real). The four stubby protrusions are Konstantin Gringauz' ion traps, which first discovered the solar wind. Note that on Luna-1, these traps are in a co-planar arrangement. The square device on the right side is a piezoelectric micrometeorite detector built by Tatiana Nazarova. She was the Soviet Union's expert on this topic.

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Again at RKK, a good model of Luna-2. Note that the ion traps are now in a tetrahedral arrangement. Gringauz saw the solar wind in the Luna-1 data, a uniform current in space, with the detector signals varying as the rotation of the probe carried them into and away from the solar wind. For Luna-2, he changed the arrangement of the traps to get a better check on that phenomenon. Variably-shielded geiger tubes, included by Vernov, are seen on the base of the magnetometer boom (top). The magnetometer, which first showed the Moon to have almost no field, was built by Dolginov.

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This is the only photo of the actual Luna-3 probe I have ever found. There are a few fairly good displays of the probe at RKK and Kaluga, but they have obviously-fake solar cells. Note tetrahedrally arranged ion traps again. At the top is the window for the camera and the photoelectric Moon finder. The four antennas at the top are meter-band transmitters for the phototelevsion signal (circular polarization). The two spools at the bottom are a long V-shaped short-wave band antenna for pulse-duration-modulated telemetry. Luna-3 used almost entirely transisterized electronics, which was quite cutting edge for 1959. It was also the first successful 3-axis stabilized spacecraft, for photography. During the cruise to the Moon and back, it was spin stabilized.

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The E-6 lander (Luna-4 to Luna-8) is on display at RKK. It is incorrectly labeled as Luna-9. The main difference was this probe was pressurized internally, and the panoramic camera extended a periscope inside the cylindrical window at the top.

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The E-6 bus, reconstructed from a Soviet documentary. Again, it was incorrectly identified as Luna-9. The major difference being the location of the airbag inflation tanks, on the ejecteable side unit (right).

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The E-6M lander was built by NPO Lavochkin, not OKB-1. A good display of it can be found at their museum. This lander was not pressurized, and a completely different camera was used (built by RNII KP), which operated in a vacuum environement and had much higher resolution than the E-6 camera.

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Luna-13 had two cameras (one of which failed) and some experiments that were deployed on the surface by cantalevered extensions. Also note, all Soviet spacecrafts were blanketed with "thermal vacuum shielding", layers of fiberglass and metal foil. The E-6 landers were cooled by water evaporation units in the base.

Great stuff; keep em coming! Thanks!

Don:

Great images! Do you reckon that all the shiny pictures are misleading, inasmuch as there's no thermal blanket? And I didn't know about the water evaporative cooling scheme - shades of Ranger-A! I still confess to a soft spot for balsa-wood Moon landers, though...

Bob Shaw

Not misleading, just typical of how everyone displays spacecrafts. NASA doesn't usually show its probes in museums all wrapped in mylar foil like a TV dinner. There are photos of the Soviet probes prepared for launch.

The Soviets had a surplus of rocket power, so their crafts were heavy and included a lot of systems that we consider a luxury today, like pressurized instrument compartments, and air-conditioning systems to control temperature. Internal spacecraft systems were a very unusual mix of solid-state, vacuum-tube and electro-mechanical technology, which probably generated a lot of heat.

Once something works, it is used for a long time, and not replace just because it is not "modern" enough. So you get technologies spanning decades. Even in the later Venera and Fobos probes, for example, the engine control computer was electro-mechanical. The thing looks like a Babbage difference engine! And in another part of the craft would be a Pilyugin BISER computer built from integrated circuits.

Babbage. Unless that was an editorial comment that went over my head.

Here are some of the third-generation Luna probes.

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Luna-16 and 20 were sample return missions. An attempt was made with Luna-15 to return a sample before Apollo 11 could, but it crash landed on the Moon.

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A drilling unit is lowered to the Moon's surface, bores a few inches into the surface and augers up some rock and soil. Two panoramic cameras view the site and help radio operators to position the drill. Then it comes up and deposits the sample in the small heat-shielded reentry pod at the top. The whole silver colored section, above the white torus, takes off and returns the pod to Earth.

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Luna-17 carried the Lunokhod ("Moon rover"), using the same base unit as Luna-16. The second picture is not a photo, but I thought it was a cool drawing of the Luna-17 and the Block-D escape stage that launches it from parking orbit to the Moon. The spherical and toroidal oxydizer and fuel tanks are classic bizarre Russian design esthetics.

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There are a lot of bad models of the Lunokhod out there. This appears to be a good photo of Lunokhod-1. The first rover opperated for almost one year and returned 200 panoramas from the surface. A radioisotope source kept it warm during the Lunar nights. It was radio opperated by a three-man crew in Simferopol, in the Crimea (and not by a dwarf inside the rover, as some skeptical Americans claimed).

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The last spacecraft to ever land on the Moon, Luna-24. I don't have a real photo of this, just this display at the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy. It is similar to Luna-16, but it has a much more complex sampling device which drilled a six-foot core and wound it up into a helical plastic tube. It is the only deep-core sample from the Moon that exists.

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Luna-19 and 22 were "heavy orbiters", based on a stripped down Lunokhod hull. They were used to study mass concentrations and improve the Soviet spherical-harmonic model of the Lunar gravitational field. They contained a linear camera that returned wide-angle panoramas. Both probes were maneuvered into extremely low "grazing" orbits.

Terrific album -- but, when it comes to deep cores, aren't you forgetting the three from Apollos 15 through 17? The Apollo 15 crew certainly wouldn't have: I will never forget listening to them spending something like a half-hour repeatedly groaning "One...two...THREE!" as they strained to pull the thing out of the ground. (During all this period, the camera on the rover -- whose vertical swivel clutch had started to jam -- kept slewing back and forth pointed downwards at the ground while the remote operator tried to get it pointed up to see the crew. He finally succeeded literally a couple of seconds before the end of the core tube finally popped out of the ground.) After that they provided a jack, which worked on Apollo 16 but broke on 17 -- but they also started running the drill backwards for a moment at the end of each drilling run, which broke it free so the 17 crew were able to pull it out fairly easily even without the jack.

Ever since then, I have been very skeptical of remote-control drilling operations on other worlds -- although the Soviets solved the problem neatly by just providing the entire drill bit with a separate internal lining which they pulled back up through the outer tube. But you can only do that once per bit...

I remembered it but always had the impression they were very shallow cores. But looking it up now, I see they the Apollo missions also drilled some there were more than 2 meters, at least as good as Luna-24.