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.

[Bob Shaw]

Don:

Excellent information, thanks! I think I begin to understand, now, thanks to the input you and Bruce gave!

Bob Shaw

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Excellent information, thanks!

The Soviet program is fascinating, but not easy to study. But it is a fun detective story,the perfect passtime for a retired scientist. Here's my Kosmos 101 guide:

1. Read Russian. That's a must, or you will just be reading a rehash of a couple original sources, copied over and over again -- someone who read an article by someone who read Chertok's books!

2. Pretty much everything you see comes from a few Russian sources, so start with those: Boris Chertok's books, the Korolev biographies by Keldysh and Raushenbakh, Pravda for the very early stuff (1957-1965 or so) but after that the scientific literature (Cosmic Research, Artificial Earth Satellites), Glushko's Encyclopedia, the big RKK Energiya books. NASA has translated versions of some of this. Cosmic Research is in English, but is not aimed at the layman. Novosti Kosmonavtiki has printed a lot of interesting historical articles, and they've also been able to answer a few obscure questions, as have people on their Russian-language space forum.

3. Soviet technical books on rocketry and spacecrafts can be very valuable. They had their own way of doing things and their own jargon. They love acronyms, so get use to reading about RNs and KAs and SAs and IPs. They have as many words for rocket as an Innuit has for snow! Raushenbakhs technical books are good, Gleb Maximov's thesis on spacecraft design, Popov's book on reentry vehicles, the various mission-specific books (Luna atlas, Venus atlas, Surface of Venus, Surface of Mars, Vega, Phobos, etc), some of which are available in English but most not.

After that, things get interesting. I've been lucky to earn the trust of most of the remaining Russian scientists. At this point they know I'm not researching yet another tell-all about how crappy the Soviet space program was, and they know I've studied their publications and work. If you want to know what was in the 2MV Venus landing capsule, there is only one source of information, the men who built it. Nothing is in print. I've also gotten to know exactly what is where in the museums and institutes in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and that's allowed me to hire TASS and private photographers to explore and photograph things.

One fellow managed to get into NPO Pilyugin and photographed a lot of stuff. On the signs and posters were tables of obscure stuff, jargon and acronyms for how guidance systems worked at different times, along with the devices on shelves. It was perfect timing, because I had just read an old rocketry book that had all this stuff in it, so it was like "Ah, that's an eletrochemicial integrator, that's an RC-chain integrator, there is the R-7 gyro horizon!". Fun stuff.