[X] My Assistant

[Dio]

>> Welcome to our discussion, Dio. It's good to have contributions from Russia. If you look back through this >> forum, under Venus, Moon and Mars, you will see we have a lot of interest in the Soviet missions. Of course >> there is still a lot more to learn. But I am especially interested in future developments including
>> Phobos-Grunt and Luna-Glob.

Thank you, Phil.

I definilely heard from some person working in Lavochkin that Luna-Glob is entirely paper work and PR of authorities. No real work was accomplished in this area since middle 90th.

>> Seems to me that one site in Cuba, one in Crimea and one near Vladivostok should work just as well as
>> Goldstone-Madrid-Canberra except perhaps at high southern latitudes.

In retrospective view, Cuba could be nice place geographically, but politically troublesome.

[MizarKey]

Many thanks to Babakm for his earlier post with context images and 4thRock too. Now I'll go looking through MGS for closeups of the region.

I also appreciate everyone else who helped to explain the imaging on those early probes.

Dio, it really is great to hear from someone in Russia and I look forward to any image you can provide that aren't mainstream.

[JonClarke]

I definilely heard from some person working in Lavochkin that Luna-Glob is entirely paper work and PR of authorities. No real work was accomplished in this area since middle 90th

In your opinion is this true of the Phobos Grunt mission also?

Thanks

Jon

[Dio]

In your opinion is this true of the Phobos Grunt mission also?

My words on this subject here are just the second-hand testimony, so my personal opinion is of no value.

The same source as above claimed that assembly of Phobos-Grunt craft is gradually carried out, though it is not work of high internal priority for Lavochkin and it was repeatedly stalled during last years. After multipe delays, re-plannings etc., noone could get qualified estimate of a-priory success ratio. There is lots of scepsis about this project. But the situation is different from Luna-Glob.

As I was informed, modern Lavochkin projects could be roughly devided to three parts.

First, alive ones with approximately clean perspective, include Spectr-R and Electro-L.

Second are half-alive, Phobos-Grunt and Spectr-UF among them.

3rd, "Luna-Glob", "Resonans" and "Spectr-M" were characterized as programs, existence of which "became known to Lavochkin collaborators from newspapers" and "to this list one could easily append landing on the surface of Sun and delivery of samples from Pluto".

[Phil Stooke]

4th Rock said "The strange thing is flying a image scanner to Mars and use it on onboard film prints and not
to image the planet itself!"

Not the same kind of scanner! The film negatives were scanned using a narrow light beam, scanned across the film in a raster, measuring the attenuation of light by the varying opacity of the negative. That isn't the same as a scanning camera that could image Mars.

Phil

[4th rock from th...]

Ok, I understand that, I was just thinking out loud about old technology and it's limitations. It was more of a "what if" question.

Here's a new Mars 5 mosaic, merging the previous results with wide angle images and color compositions. Data from the last 2 imaging sessions was used as base map for the high resolution images.



The image is big so that the highres images keep some quality.

Seen like this, I think that Mars 5 did get very good images ;-)

[nprev]

Yes, really not at all bad...comparable to many Mariner 9 frames in your rendering, 4Rock. Man...sure wish the landers had made it!

[4th rock from th...]

The problem with the Mars 5 (and 4) images is the lack of flat and "bias" field correction to the raw images. Once you use them, the surface details become visible and the images fit into very nice mosaics. I don't think that the computers of the time were able to perform this type of processing, or even if the theory was known at the time. That's why the images look so poor, they only show the limitations of the imaging system and not it's potential ;-)

[JonClarke]

My words on this subject here are just the second-hand testimony, so my personal opinion is of no value.

I would not be so deprecating of your contribution. It is most valued. Thanks for sharing it.

What you say is a bit disapointing, but understandable under the circumstances. It's good to hear that Spectr-R and Electro-L are looking good, and that the fact that some work is still being done Phobos-Grunt and Spectr-UF is encouraging. I hope they fly. I met some people from Lavochin several years ago, I was most impressed.

Best

Jon