Soviet Luna Missions Options

[PhilHorzempa]

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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

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

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.