Soviet Luna Missions Options

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Shevchenko refused to let me copy anything -

Yeah, Kira has been trying to get the Luna-3 images from him. Sigh...

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Beautiful work. If I ever can get my hands on the photographs or the signal, I will let you know!


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.

Interesting. One of the side revelations from that very informative Sept. 2000 "JBIS" article on the 1963-68 Soviet Luna missions is that the first evidence of the lunar mascons actually came from tracking of Luna 10, not Lunar Orbiter 1. (The article also claims that Luna 10's gamma-ray spectrometer, rather than Surveyor 5, provided the first evidence of the Moon's basaltic composition -- but I remember reading at the time that the Soviets' early conclusion was that it had shown the moon to be granitic instead. But then, I've always been highly suspicious of the accuracy of Soviet scientific instruments -- also including their initial interpretation of Venera 8's gamma-ray data as granite.)

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Interesting. One of the side revelations from that very informative Sept. 2000 "JBIS" article on the 1963-68 Soviet Luna missions is that the first evidence of the lunar mascons actually came from tracking of Luna 10, not Lunar Orbiter 1. (The article also claims that Luna 10's gamma-ray spectrometer, rather than Surveyor 5, provided the first evidence of the Moon's basaltic composition -- but I remember reading at the time that the Soviets' early conclusion was that it had shown the moon to be granitic instead. But then, I've always been highly suspicious of the accuracy of Soviet scientific instruments -- also including their initial interpretation of Venera 8's gamma-ray data as granite.)

The conclusion from Luna-10 was that the Moon was basaltic. The instrument was a 32-channel analyzer connected to a sodium iodide scintillator. The crystal was enclosed in an anti-coincidence shield for the elimination of charged-particle counts. Spectra were obtained at many orbital positions, to compare the mare and "continental" lunar crust. A year earlier, an overall gamma spectrum of the Moon was measured from an Earth orbiting satellite, the stranded E-6 probe, Kosmos-60.

The gamma spectrometers on Venera-8 to Vega were identical instruments, so the unusual spectrum from the Venera-8 site is not assumed to be "incorrect". With so few places on the surface of Venus sampled, it is entirely possible that there is variation in the composition of its crust.

The energy spectrum measured by these devices includes the three signatures of Potassium, Uranium and Thorium, the only three naturally occuring radioactive elements. Background levels are measured before approaching the Moon or Venus, to eliminate the effect of braking x-rays caused by cosmic rays colliding with the hull of the spacecraft. They are also calibrated against samples of terrestrial rocks of course, where the ratios of K U Th are well known.

[Phil Stooke]

Don, could you please fill in a few more details about Kosmos-60? I knew it was stranded in Earth orbit, but I didn't know it had been able to make lunar observations.

By the way, it's good to have you here!

Phil

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Don, could you please fill in a few more details about Kosmos-60? I knew it was stranded in Earth orbit, but I didn't know it had been able to make lunar observations.

By the way, it's good to have you here!

Phil

There's a paper by Vinogradov in Moon and Planets. Kosmos-60 was a Luna-8 style probe, which was stranded in its parking orbit due to a block-L malfunctioned. It carried a multichannel gamma-ray spectrometer. It wasn't in the lander, it must have been in the spacecraft bus.

The paper is mostly dealing with data that is very noisy, since it was designed to get a lot closer to the Moon, obviously. The Russians did a lot of experiments with particle accelerators, calibrating this instrument to see what kinds of cosmogenic isotopes would be created in lunar basalt and in the spacecraft hull, so they could separate that signal from the natural radioisotope (K, U, Th) radiation from the Moon. They make cautious statements about the actual data being consistant with their calculations and accelerator simulations; that is, a combination of cosmogenic and lunar isotopes.

[ljk4-1]

The conclusion from Luna-10 was that the Moon was basaltic. The instrument was a 32-channel analyzer connected to a sodium iodide scintillator. The crystal was enclosed in an anti-coincidence shield for the elimination of charged-particle counts. Spectra were obtained at many orbital positions, to compare the mare and "continental" lunar crust. A year earlier, an overall gamma spectrum of the Moon was measured from an Earth orbiting satellite, the stranded E-6 probe, Kosmos-60.

The gamma spectrometers on Venera-8 to Vega were identical instruments, so the unusual spectrum from the Venera-8 site is not assumed to be "incorrect". With so few places on the surface of Venus sampled, it is entirely possible that there is variation in the composition of its crust.

The energy spectrum measured by these devices includes the three signatures of Potassium, Uranium and Thorium, the only three naturally occuring radioactive elements. Background levels are measured before approaching the Moon or Venus, to eliminate the effect of braking x-rays caused by cosmic rays colliding with the hull of the spacecraft. They are also calibrated against samples of terrestrial rocks of course, where the ratios of K U Th are well known.

According to JANE'S SOLAR SYSTEM LOG (Andrew Wilson, Jane's Publishing, Inc.,
New York, 1987), the surface around Venera 8's landing site at Navka Planitia could
be a rare form of basalt, one with high potassium levels.

I like the term "anti-coincidence shield". Has so many potential uses.

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

According to JANE'S SOLAR SYSTEM LOG (Andrew Wilson, Jane's Publishing, Inc.,
New York, 1987), the surface around Venera 8's landing site at Navka Planitia could
be a rare form of basalt, one with high potassium levels.

I like the term "anti-coincidence shield". Has so many potential uses.

Yes, and in fact sodium and potassium rich lavas melt easily, so they may be the cause of the long channels. Remember, material that are dissolved in the ocean on Earth (chlorides, alkali metals, etc) are just "rocks" on Venus. Or they are gasses (a lot of metal chorides boil well below Venusian surface temperature). What a place!

"Anti-Coincidence Shield" is a good one. My favorite not-made-up scientific term is "Quantum Nondemolition Oscillator", heard at a physics talk on gravity waves at Caltech.

When charged particles go through a detector, they leave a trail of ionization, like you see in a cloud chamber or bubble chamber photo. But photons, such as gamma rays, pass through material with no effect until they interact entirely with a single atom. So if you surround a detector with other detectors, you can filter out gamma-ray events, by picking only events that trigger the inner detector but not the surrounding ones. The first such device for Venus surface gamma-ray study was installed on the failed 1962 2MV lander.

This is also why you don't want to spend years in interplanetary space, charged-particle cosmic radiation is really really bad for you.

[Phil Stooke]

PhilHorzempa asked about Luna 19 and Luna 22 images.

Go here:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...1106&hl=luna+22

Phil

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

There's been quite a lot written recently by Basilevsky about the Venera findings in perspective, and he does indeed agree that what Venera 8 actually detected was a relatively high-silica basalt. In fact, the last I heard, he thought it might very well have landed on one of Venus' numerous "pancake domes", which seem to be made of a particularly viscous lava which is probably therefore silica-rich. Felsic -- that is, granitic or silica-rich -- lava is somewhat paradoxical: it melts at a considerably lower temperature than "mafic" (e.g., basalt-type) lava, but after the latter actually does melt it's far runnier and less viscous than felsic lava.

[4th rock from th...]

Here's an updated Zond 3 mosaic. I did some reprojection of the images and was able to expand the coverage a little bit.

I also used the same "de-stripping" processing as in the Luna 3 images do clean the pictures.

A brighness gradient was added in Photoshop, along with some color and a picture of the spacecraft.

Looks nice ;-)

[Ian R]

Wow! Great work!

Is that the eastern rim of the South Pole-Aitken basin I can see to the left of Orientale?

[ustrax]

Here's an updated Zond 3 mosaic. I did some reprojection of the images and was able to expand the coverage a little bit.

I also used the same "de-stripping" processing as in the Luna 3 images do clean the pictures.

A brighness gradient was added in Photoshop, along with some color and a picture of the spacecraft.

Looks nice ;-)

Grande trabalho caro concidadão!

[ilbasso]

I think that has to be the first Russian image where I have actually been able to tell what I was looking at. Great work!!

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

I think that has to be the first Russian image where I have actually been able to tell what I was looking at. Great work!!

The biggest problem with Soviet images is that we see images damaged by generational loss. The Russians have a first-generation copy of analog or digital image data. Then it gets copied to film, then printed, then descreened and printed again in the West, then scanned by someone, and finally we have a horribly image.

Here is an example, Venera-9's panorama, as it appeares in many Western media, a USGS film recording from Russia, and properly processed original digital data:

[attachment=5881:attachment]

[ljk4-1]

Check this out - a scale model of Luna 24 complete with actual lunar surface
samples attached to the base:

http://www.maxuta.biz/luna_24_soil/

It was a gift to some guy named Leonid Brezhnev for his 70th birthday in 1976.

And it's actually a model of the Luna 16-20 versions, but what the hey.