Opportunity Route Map Options

[edstrick]

The *REAL* problem with the Lunokhods were that the entire engineering effort concentrated on the enormous task of getting it there and roving. The science package and capabilities of the Lunokhods were rudimentary.

Lunokhod 1 carried analog mechanical facimilie cameras, unfortunately with rather high noise levels most of the time, an X-ray fluorescence unit for crude ground chemistry, a mechanical properties testor, and a sky-light photometer for daytime/nighttime sky brightness measurements. And the passive laser reflector.

Lunokhod 2 added a magnetometer and tweeked the payload in a few ways.

The published science results from these rovers, as far as I can tell, was less then rudimentary. The Surveyors, designed as engineering test missions, were milked for all they were worth for science data, and up to two sicence instruments were added within the limited modification range of the spacecraft after they were already built. These were vastly documented in Science Magazine articles, NASA SP publications, and more extensive JPL TR series mission reports, plus scattered reports in other journals.

Lunokhod science results were dribbled out in Soviet journals like "Cosmic Research" and other major journals available in translation, but the entire batch I was able to find with systematic searching adds up to maybe a 1/2 or 2/3 inche thick wad of xeroxed papers, most of which are wordy but don't have much real science to report. <sigh>

I also have a NASA or other US governmanet translation of a "Lunokhod 1 Mission Report", reprinted from microfilm (better than those usually were), but it's also pretty bare, though it does contain a lot of engineering and operations info I'd never seen elsewhere.. but the science is limited and essentially told us a lot of things we already knew.

[Bob Shaw]

The major goal of both Lunokhods appears to have been simply that of driving as far as possible for as long as possible, thus upstaging the US to some degree (as with the automated sample return flights) - science was a side issue. All of these were triumphs of far greater significance than their propaganda aims, however, and are worth a great deal simply as examples proving that these things *can* be done.

Bob Shaw

[edstrick]

Yep, though there's been s__t-loads of science from the sample return missions. Whole volumes of papers. Not as good as Apollo missions after Apollo 11 by a long shot (11's samples were dominated by regolith breccias and were sort of like the luna samples in some ways), but enormously valuable as known-map-location sample returns full of tiny rock chips and mineral grains..

Like Stardust, but a lot more sample. We learned a lot of proto-stardust type methods of sample analysis on Luna sample allotments.

[Guest_Oersted_*]

...But just imagine if NASA had taken the cue from the Lunokhod missions and had put some wheels on the Viking landers. It could have been done. Then we would have had Mars rovers 30 years before we actually did get them!

Maybe the scientific return from the Lunokhod rovers was not anywhere near what we are getting with the Mars rovers, but remember how different technology was back then. For their time, they were pretty impressive, but of course not so much when we remember that they were up against human explorers.

However, the Soviets not only pioneered automated rovers, but also automated sample return missions and deserve credit for those technological breakthroughs, regardless of the fact that they were made in the context of Cold War upstaging (as Apollo).

[Nirgal]

...But just imagine if NASA had taken the cue from the Lunokhod missions and had put some wheels on the Viking landers. It could have been done. Then we would have had Mars rovers 30 years before we actually did get them!

´
it's not so simple
the difference in roving the Moon versus roving Mars is that the former can (in principle) be done in "real time" with simple 1960 TV camera + remote control whereas the task of roving Mars is fundamentally more difficult due to the long distance radio signal delay (limited speed of light) with the hour-long
delay of direct feedback.
So it's mainly the AI (Artificial Intelligence) enabled by the lightweight and powerful early 1990 micro computer technoloy together with the advanced autonomous navigation software that's key for the MER
mission.
I remember reading in the space books in my childhood (late 1970ties) that predicted the first Mars rovers for the mid-1980ties and the emphasis was in the utilization of quite an impressive predicted artificially intelligent "computer brain" to be used by the hypothetical rover ...

so the prdiction sort of became true at last even so with about twenty years of delay ...

and while we are at it: there was that other prediction in another book about "a fleet of nuclear powerd manned space ships sent to mars by 1985" ...

[Phil Stooke]

The original purpose of the Lunokhods was to survey human landing sites and deposit one or more radio beacons to guide the lander. (Exactly the same as the once-proposed Surveyor rovers). If the program had continued they were to be used in conjunction with sample return missions to gather samples over a wider area. The Lunokhods as flown were neither, and could be thought of as a combination of engineering tests with a bit of science added. However, the lack of publication of results is misleading. Lunokhod-2 did a lot that was never properly published. The money ran out too soon. There is some interest in trying to recover the old data sets, but there's no money for that either so it is painfully slow. I have been told (by the people involved) that the TV transmissions used to drive the rovers - not the panoramic photos - were recently recovered and might eventually be available.

Phil

[ronatu]

The *REAL* problem with the Lunokhods were that the entire engineering effort concentrated on the enormous task of getting it there and roving. The science package and capabilities of the Lunokhods were rudimentary.

The Lunokhod itself consisted of a tub-like compartment with a large convex lid on eight wheels. It stood 135 cm high, 170 cm long and 160 cm wide, with a mass of 840 kg. The 8 wheels each had an independent suspension, motor and brake. The rover had two speeds, ~1 km/hr and ~2 km/hr. Lunokhod was equipped with four TV cameras, three of them panoramic cameras. The fourth was mounted high on the rover for navigation, and could return high resolution images at different rates (3.2, 5.7, 10.9 or 21.1 seconds per frame). These images were used by a five-man team of controllers on Earth who sent driving commands to the rover in real time. Communications were through a cone-shaped omni-antenna and a highly directional helical antenna. Power was supplied by a solar panel on the inside of a round hinged lid which covered the instrument bay. A Polonium-210 isotopic heat source was used to keep the rover warm during the lunar nights. Scientific instruments included a soil mechanics tester, solar X-ray experiment, an astrophotometer to measure visible and UV light levels, a magnetometer deployed in front of the rover on the end of a 2.5 m boom, a radiometer, a photodetector (Rubin-1) for laser detection experiments, and a French-supplied laser corner-reflector. Lunokhod was designed to operate through three lunar days (three earth months) but greatly exceeded this in operation.

[edstrick]

"... the TV transmissions used to drive the rovers - not the panoramic photos - were recently recovered ..."

(nods at Phil) Good!

A big part of the problem indeed seems to have been a failure of science funding support, especially for #2. Remember that Surveyors 8 through 14 were scrubbed before #1 ever flew, so we only flew the engineering test vehicles, instrumented to the gills for flight performance data, but not science.

Surveyor 1 carried a descent TV camera, not used (at least partly due to the failure of one omniantenna to deploy so they didn't point the high-gain antenna at Earth during the final descent), and the Survey Camera, both "engineering" instruments. #2 crashed and #3 and #4 (which failed) substituded the soil mechanics instrument for the descent campera, using the descent camera's controller to control the arm. #5 and 6 substututed the alpha-xray chemistry set for the arm, while #7 managed to find some way of carrying both the alpha-xray and the arm, which SAVED the alpha-xray which didn't deploy properly on it's own!

There was a proposal to fly the Viking 3 mission using engineering hardware and putting little crawler feet on the lander giving it a primary mission capability of a few tens of meters. I think ALL legged landers like Phoenix should include that ability. But Viking 3 got the same "oh-YAWN!" reaction that the Halley Rendezvous proposals got and never flew. "We've DONE Mars".

[Tesheiner]

Route map, updated to sol 751.

(239k)

[hendric]

Has anyone done a size comparison of the Lunokhod rovers vs the MER/Sojourner rovers? Would be a neat 3D picture.

[edstrick]

Has anyone done a size comparison of the Lunokhod rovers vs the MER/Sojourner rovers...

A good graphic would be all wheeled (or equivalent) planetary rovers, including the astronaut dragged MET from Apollo 14 and the later rovers.

[Tesheiner]

Route map, updated to sol 753.

(239k)

OT: I'm really surprised by the Lunokhod rovers performance that long time ago. Shouldn't this discussion be moved to another new thread?

[Tesheiner]

Route map, enlarged and updated to sol 755.

(330k)

This post has been edited by Tesheiner: Mar 10 2006, 03:36 PM

[Tesheiner]

Route map, updated to sol 758.

(330k)

[centsworth_II]

Route map, updated to sol 758.

I love your Opportunity route maps with the landing ellipse. I know the width of the ellipse reflects the degree of certainty of its location based on NASA illustrations of the ellipse, but I was wondering if there is an actual mathematical description of the ellipse somewhere that could be represented by a line -- or several lines representing different probabilities of containing the landing site.