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

[edstrick]

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.