Soviet Lunar Images Options

[Phil Stooke]

This story mentions Jodrell Bank radio telescope in the UK picking up some Luna 3 transmissions. If you Google 'Luna 3' you find some websites which mangle this story, saying that JB released the Luna 3 images in a distorted format. That is mixing up the Luna 3 story with Luna 9, where they did indeed jump the gun with a controversial release. It makes no sense to imagine Luna 3 images released in distorted form, as the non-circular disk would immediately give the game away.

Phil

[ljk4-1]

Forty years ago today - launch of the first successful soft-landing probe on the Moon, the Soviet Luna 9.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/Master...og?sc=1966-006A

Launch Date/Time: 1966-01-31 at 11:45:00 UTC

On-orbit Dry Mass: 1580 kg

Description

The Luna 9 spacecraft was the first spacecraft to achieve a lunar soft
landing and to transmit photographic data to Earth. The automatic lunar
station that achieved the soft landing weighed 99 kg. It was a hermetically
sealed container with radio equipment, a program timing device, heat control
systems, scientific apparatus, power sources, and a television system. The
Luna 9 payload was carried to Earth orbit by an A-2-E vehicle and then
conveyed toward the Moon by a fourth stage rocket that separated itself from
the payload. Flight apparatus separated from the payload shortly before Luna
9 landed. After landing in the Ocean of Storms on February 3, 1966, the four
petals, which formed the spacecraft, opened outward and stabilized the
spacecraft on the lunar surface. Spring-controlled antennas assumed
operating positions, and the television camera rotatable mirror system,
which operated by revolving and tilting, began a photographic survey of the
lunar environment. Seven radio sessions, totaling 8 hours and 5 minutes,
were transmitted as were three series of TV pictures. When assembled, the
photographs provided a panoramic view of the nearby lunar surface. The
pictures included views of nearby rocks and of the horizon 1.4 km away from
the spacecraft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9

http://selena.sai.msu.ru/Home/Spacecrafts/Luna-9/luna-9e.htm

http://www.zarya.info/Diaries/Luna/Luna9.htm

http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogMoon.htm

[tedstryk]

I was working on an improved Luna 9 pan. I was dealt a setback due to my hard drive failure, but fortunately, I was able to find a backup, althoug some work had been done since and was lost. The Luna 9 scanning mechanism is an odd one...It seems inconsistent in terms of how it scanned.

[Andy S]

I can provide more information on the Luna 5 event. 

This dust cloud was  located near Pitatus crater south of Mare Nubium.  Luna 5 itself crashed near Lansberg crater, close to the equator.  The Pitatus event was caused by the upper stage which propelled Luna 5 to the moon.

Phil

Phil, could you say where you got this information from?

I have searched all the main internet sites for information on these old Luna probes, but have never come across this. In fact, the main sites tend to lack much detail, compared to the better-documented NASA missions. I suspect that more information is available somewhere.

I'd be obliged if anyone can help,

Andy (making his first post)

[Phil Stooke]

Andy - the pictures of the Luna 5 'cloud' were published in New Scientist not long after the mission. Four pics show it grow and fade. A bit fuzzy, but I overlaid them on better images to see the locations better. I regret I don't (right now) have the proper reference to it, but I will be looking it out eventually for a wee project of mine. If anybody else can track it down I'd be very pleased.

The internet is fabulous for new information but very poor for the sort of historical thing you are trying to find. Unless somebody has actually taken the trouble to compile it, like Don Mitchell with his Soviet moon/Venus/Mars images.

Phil

[Toma B]

Recently somebody on this forum posted a link to a web page that contains old Soviet Moon images…at the same time I was experimenting with some auto-colorize program so I decided to join these two…images from Zond-8 colorized in “Recolored”.
This is not REAL COLOR just cleaned and hand colored images…
However it looks good on Desktop wallpaper…

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

(1) The Soviet naming system for its first few years of launches bore no resemblance whatsoever to the names attached to the missions by the US press for convenience. Not only were the first three Lunas not called that at the time, but Venera 1 was also really called one of the "Cosmic Rockets". And "Sputniks 4 through 10", the unmanned Vostok tests and the two orbital stages for the 1961 Veneras (one of which failed to restart), were none of them called Sputnik -- they were given some other awkward names that I've forgotten.

Then, after sensibly calling their next two deep-space probes Mars 1 and Luna 4, the Soviets -- on Khrushchev's insistence -- gave their 1964 Venus probe the noncommittal name of Zond ("Probe") 1, and didn't admit for months that it was even aimed at Venus, so that they had some alibi (very transparent) if it failed, as it did. They even called their 1964 Mars probe Zond 2, despite the fact that they admitted instantly that it was aimed at Mars (and also that it had serious power problems) -- but Khruschchev had been kicked out just the month before, and after that the Brezhnev government at least stopped that nonsensical game of nomenclatural peekaboo.

You bring up an interesting question, when did the name Venera-1 first get used?

Russian scientists referred to it as the "automatic interplanetary station to Venus", but of course they never say that, they say "AMS to Venus". Western translators also confuse the issue. One paper in english called it "Space Probe 4", but when I looked at the Russian original, no such thing was ever said, it was the "AMS to Venus". So some of this confusion seems invented by Western translators trying to apply their own organization to the terminology.

One problem with this general issue is that the Russians have their own particular jargon and terminology, which doesn't always translate well. For example, sputnik is often perceived as a proper noun in the West, but it is not, it simply is the Russian word for "satellite". In their literature, the acronym "ISZ" (artificial Earth satellite) is almost universally used, and instead of saying Sputnik-2, they will say "the second artifical Earth satellite" or "the second satellite". The Vostok test vehicles were called orbiting ships (korabl sputnik), which again confused Western writers.

The word kosmicheskie (koss MEECH eh skee eh) is another subtle word. It means "space", but it often connotes "deep space". For example, a rocket that goes into orbit is a raketa nositel (rah KET ah nah SEE tel) or "RN" s they would write, but a rocket that launches to an escape trajectory is a raketa kosmicheskie or "RK". Thus, Luna-2 was launched by the "second cosmic rocket", or sometimes "second space rocket".

When the 3MV vehicles were being designed, six models were specified, Mars lander, Mars photoflyby, Venus lander, Venus flyby, Mars test probe and Venus test probe (the latter two called Zond-A and Zond-B ). Zond seems to connote a test vehicle sent out before you send the "real thing", but its usage in final naming was not always clear. Zond-1 and Zond-2 were, as far as I can tell, actual final versions of the Venus lander and the Mars photoflyby. Some actual Zond-A and Zond-B vehicles were launched earlier and failed.

Of course, Kosmos became a general term for pretty much everything sent into orbit, when they didn't want to really explain that this was a spy satellite or that was a space probe that fizzled.

[Phil Stooke]

Replying to Andy, post 34 above:

The Luna 5 dust cloud images (if they are real) are in:

New Scientist, Vol. 26, no. 449, p. 842, 24 June 1965, "Photos of dust raised by moon probe"

Phil

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

The Soviets seem to have finally clarified their initial awkward nomenclature in mid-1961. "Sputniks" 4 through 10 were also given that name by the Western press; they also actually had some kind of confusing and awkward separate multiword series name (or names). Then, starting with Vostok 1 -- probably at Korolev's insistence -- they stopped that stuff (even if they did name almost everything they launched from then on "Kosmos").