Soviet Luna Missions Options

[Paolo]

I had never noticed that many of the side camera panoramic scans feature also at their edges the circular solar panel/bathtub cover

[elakdawalla]

I just got a few diagrams from Sasha Basilevsky that might help us figure out the nature of the geometric distortion in the Lunokhod panoramas...can anyone help me figure out which of the cameras on the diagrams is (are) the one(s) that produced the posted panoramas?

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[Hungry4info]

I'm pretty sure the last one was used, but I am not 100% sure.

[elakdawalla]

So does that mean
- they had a 30 degree field of view, covering elevations from 0 to minus 30 degrees at the center of the view?
- they panned on an axis tilted 15 degrees down from horizontal, so if they rotated 90 degrees to one side, they'd cover elevations of (slightly less than) +15 to -15 degrees?
- the panoramic cameras were on the two sides of the rover, positioned 10 degrees toward the rear?
- if the last is true, and if they cover 180 degrees side to side, then the panoramas from the two cameras should overlap in back of the rover but not in front, where there were stereo cameras mounted?

[Phil Stooke]

The overlap area at the back, if any, is probably lost behind the rover body at the end of the pan.

A few pans show a round object with a concentric pattern on it - that's the top of the side-looking panoramic camera seen by the fore-and-aft-looking camera just above it, where it was looking downwards at the middle of its view.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

This is a comparison of one of the new Lunokhod 1 panoramas with a Lunar Orbiter mosaic (courtesy our pals at Google). Parts of the highlands west of Promontorium Heraclides are visible on the horizon. I can't be certain yet that this match is right but it looks pretty good.

Phil

[ngunn]

I'd been wondering if anyone was working on this since first seeing that spectacular skyline. That looks pretty convincing, right down to one of the pair of little craters in the gap between mountains just left of centre in the panorama.

[peter59]

Information for those who know Russian language. Two interesting monographs are available online:

Peredvizhnaya Laboratoriya na Lune Lunokhod-1. Tom 1. (Mobile Laboratory Lunokhod-1 on the Moon. Vol.1.). 1971. Ed.: Vinogradov, A. P. Moscow, Nauka. 128 p. (In Russian) (166 MB)

Peredvizhnaya Laboratoriya na Lune Lunokhod-1 . Tom 2. (Mobile Laboratory Lunokhod-1 on the Moon. Vol.2.). 1978. Ed.: Barsukov, V. L. Moscow, Nauka. 183 p. (In Russian) (130 MB)

http://planetology.ru/panoramas/materials....anguage=english

[tedstryk]

THANKS!!!!!

[kenny]

This Luna 20 photo has been seen elsewhere, and is in Phil's Atlas of Lunar Exploration as part of a panorama, but perhaps the identification of the drill hole has not been made before.

Note this version is a mirror-image of the way Phil displays it. The identification of the drill hole was done by reputable Soviet space journalist Peter Smolders in his 1973 book "Soviets in Space".

[Phil Stooke]

The mirror image business complicates all interpretations of the Luna and Lunokhod images. I first became aware of it when I compared Lunokhod panoramas with maps of small areas in those Lunokhod books linkled just above - they only made sense if the panoramas were reversed. But the Luna 9 and 13 panoramas are not reversed relative to their site plans. So what's the story with everything else? I reversed the Luna 20 panorama because the two end sections had to point in specified directions, but the middle section is not so certain. I drew my plan of the Luna 21 landing site backwards by mistake (compared with the LRO image now available) for this reason. An unambiguous statement from Russian colleagues would be very useful!

Phil

[kenny]

Close up of the dril hole area, from a better photo supplied by Dave Harland.

The presumed hole is the black spot in center. Or perhaps more accurately, the white oval ring around it is the diameter of the hole, and the black patch is the far wall of the hole in shadow.

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[tedstryk]

I made mosaics with the fragments I could find. I had a version I posted once upon a time that extended to the horizon on the right, but I was less than sure that I had connected those images correctly, so I made a separate panorama out of them (the last image in the blog post). http://planetimages.blogspot.com/2010/03/luna-20.html

[kenny]

Very nice panos. The pair on your blog illustrate the ability of the arm to move left-right (in azimuth) and both shots are seen to have been made post-drilling - assuming Smolders was correct in 1973, and his white box does indeed enclose the hole. Phil's atlas has a nice photo which convincingly shows the same area before drilling, and it looks quite different.

[Phil Stooke]

Kenny asked me this question privately, but I thought the answer might be of more general interest so (if you'll forgive me, Kenny) I will post it here.

I tried to identify the Luna 20 landing site in my lunar atlas, based on a proposed match between the surface images and Lunar Orbiter images. It was the same position suggested earlier by George Burba. Kenny asked how far I was from the LROC position. I hadn't checked, so here is my answer after a careful comparison of the images. I was about 7 km out! That is comparable to the uncertainties at most lunar sites until you can narrow it down with images. Needless to say, my image analysis was off, and I will have to go back into the pictures and try to figure out why. Oh well, at least I tried!

Phil