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Soviet Luna Missions
Bob Shaw
post May 16 2006, 12:22 PM
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Don:

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

Bob Shaw


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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post May 16 2006, 02:35 PM
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QUOTE (edstrick @ May 16 2006, 02:49 AM) *
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.


The technical issue is filter kernel support. Fourier transform filtering is bad because it is too global. Removing the stipple pattern from one place will create a stipple pattern in a smooth area. The box filter is not a very good filter, but it has very local properties. The Right Thing To Do ™ is to use a windowed comb filter of some sort. Photoshop's filtering system is not good enough to define such a thing, so I'll have to do it in C++ one of these days.
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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post May 16 2006, 03:20 PM
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QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ May 16 2006, 05:22 AM) *
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.
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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post May 16 2006, 03:33 PM
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Here's a piece from Boris Chertok, describing a failed Luna probe launch in 1960. Pardon my translation skills...

QUOTE
This time, using twilight, I decided on the fifteen-minute readiness to go away from the control bunker, into the steppe towards the launching site. Without hurrying, delighted by the aroma of steppe, I stopped at 300 meters and admired by the vividly illuminated by searchlights rocket. From control bunker is audible intensified by dynamic loudspeakers report, "one minute readiness". I'm stunned by the roar of all engines!

I see or surmise that the lateral stage E nearest to me does not depart together with entire rocket, but, vomiting flame, it falls downward. Remaining stages reluctantly go upward and it seems directly must toward me, they are scattered. I badly consider, which way to fly, but I feel, that one of the blocks with the roaring engine in next seconds will cover me. To run! Only to run!

Now in the steppe, vividly iluminated by the torch of the rocket stage E flying to me, I probably placed my pesonal record. But steppe - not racetrack. I stumble and fall, having been painfully struck by elbow. It is behind heard explosion, and it pours over me hot air. The lumps of the earth raised by explosion next fall. I hobble to the side of control bunker, it is further from the enormous hot bonfire which blazes next to that place, from where I ran!

Center stage fell and exploded at MIK headwharters itself - glass in the windows and door were knocked out, plastering inside crumbled. One officer, whom by blast wave it struck against the wall, obtained injuries.


And by the way, you can go to Baikonur to witness a launch. Unlike Cape Canaveral, the Russians are perfectly happy to let you stand 300 meters from a Soyuz when it takes off. :-)
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djellison
post May 16 2006, 03:46 PM
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QUOTE (DonPMitchell @ May 16 2006, 04:33 PM) *
the Russians are perfectly happy to let you stand 300 meters from a Soyuz when it takes off. :-)


That must be spectacular!

Doug
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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post May 16 2006, 04:16 PM
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QUOTE (djellison @ May 16 2006, 08:46 AM) *
That must be spectacular!

Doug

I haven't done it, but I'd like to.
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Toma B
post May 16 2006, 04:19 PM
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QUOTE (djellison @ May 16 2006, 05:46 PM) *
That must be spectacular!

Doug


Spectacularly LLLOOOOOUUUUDDDDD!!!!!! smile.gif


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Bob Shaw
post May 16 2006, 05:47 PM
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B)-->
QUOTE(Toma B @ May 16 2006, 05:19 PM) *

Spectacularly LLLOOOOOUUUUDDDDD!!!!!! smile.gif
[/quote]

Let's book a bus.

Does RyanAir do Baikonur (or 'East Moscow' as it probably says in the schedules!)?

Bob Shaw


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PhilHorzempa
post May 20 2006, 04:07 AM
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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
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4th rock from th...
post May 21 2006, 09:01 PM
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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

Attached Image
Attached Image

Attached Image
Attached Image

Attached Image

Attached Image



Attached Image


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Bob Shaw
post May 21 2006, 09:09 PM
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Ricardo:

Great work!

Do you think any of those frames would work as animated .gif files?

Bob Shaw


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tedstryk
post May 21 2006, 09:24 PM
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Beautiful!


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4th rock from th...
post May 21 2006, 10:33 PM
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QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ May 21 2006, 10:09 PM) *
Do you think any of those frames would work as animated .gif files?


Dificult to say... there's some perspective change along the image sequence, but not much. Mainly just image distortion and rotation.
Also, the noise on the original images is so high that you would have a hard time seeing much on an animation.

Anyway, don't use my processed images for that, because I used simple circle as a the Moon's limb to position and trim the images.


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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post May 21 2006, 11:01 PM
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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?


QUOTE (PhilHorzempa @ May 19 2006, 09:07 PM) *

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


Yes, the "heavy luna orbiters" were built in Lunokhod shells, but the camera system was especially made for these missions, a fish-eye linear camera with a rotating prism scanner and photomulitplier tube. The quality of the images was not bad.

Phil Stooke can tell you more than anyone else about this. I know the Luna-22 orbiter was maneuvered into a circular orbit only 25 km above the surface, for sensitive measurements of mass concentrations. The Moon is very "lumpy". The cameras were used in part to get horizon lines during these orbits.

You can find some of the images in my catalog: Soviet Catalog. The Luna-22 panoramas are pieced together from films scanned by Phil Stooke.
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Phil Stooke
post May 22 2006, 02:23 AM
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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


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... because the Solar System ain't gonna map itself.

Also to be found posting similar content on https://mastodon.social/@PhilStooke
NOTE: everything created by me which I post on UMSF is considered to be in the public domain (NOT CC, public domain)
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