Yes, but it may at least be printed somewhere. I know I found one of my soviet images in a journal from the academy of sciences in Kyrgyzstan! There are lots of little obscure sources, so my hopes are that they are somewhere. The quality might not be good, but it would nice to have for history's sake.

My guess is they were not published, but film recordings were made and are in someone's drawer at RNII KP, scratched up and gathering dust.

Hi,

I recently encountered a Polish space encyclopedia titled "Copernicus, Astronomy, Astronautics" which contained a colour picture of Earth above Moon's horizon from Zond spacecraft, similar to the one recently reprocessed here. But what really caught my attention was information on Luna 15 spacecraft, which coincided with Apollo 11 landing on the Moon:

Luna 15 in Wiki

It states apolune of Luna 15 was 110 km, similar to that of the orbital module of Apollo 11 - so was there any collision hazard issue there? I was also wondering, could it actually be sighted by astronauts on the ground? And if not, did any other astronauts during other Apollo missions actually observe artifical satellites circling the Moon at that time?

Regards,

Karol P.

Edit:

The Polish Wikipedia entry:

Lunokhod in Polish Wiki

states that a launcher carrying a Lunokhod even before Lunokhod 1, designated Lunokhod 201, crashed soon after lift off on Februray 19, 1969 indicating an abvious attempt by the Soviets to place a rover on the Moon before the American manned mission. So was it really a theme of interference with Apollo and stealing the publicity even though their manned Lunar program collapsed?

And we have a movieclip of the test:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/movies/Soviet...0bag%20test.wmv (1.1 MB)

Hello:) From Ural with cosmic love, special 4 us, who has not forgotten and esteems the Russian astronautics:

http://pq.vp.video.l.google.com/videodownl...documentary.mp4

about Marsokhod

Ups


Google
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Regarding the Luna 16, 20, and 24 sample returns, does anyone have solid verifiable information about the mass or physical size of the upper part that launched off the moon? I have seen conflicting information that the earth entry capsule (the sphere at the top) was anywhere between 1 foot and 3 feet in diameter. Anything more accurate and verifiable would be much appreciated. Has anyone been to the NPO Lavochkin Museum where the sample return capsules are (or were) on display?

Below is some information about how the Luna ascent vehicles worked:

It was functionally very simple engineering, tailored to the particular physical situation. The moon's small size (compared to Mars) permitted a direct return. Not going into lunar orbit meant no circularization (orbit insertion) burn, and the fact that the target (earth) was gravitationally large and nearby meant no midcourse corrections either. No need for any engine restarts or staging. A single propulsive burn from the 1-stage ascent vehicle was simply timed (both moment of launch relative to the calendar, and burn duration).

Guidance consisted of flying a vertical trajectory off the moon. The vernier engines were controlled by a local vertical sensor, a pendulum! Site selection was limited to the east side of the moon, where a vertical ascent reduced the geocentric velocity compared to the moon's, so it was effectively just a deorbit burn with respect to the earth. Velocity would have been less than lunar escape velocity, since the earth was sitting there pulling it home. The return stage had a transmitter that could be switched on and off by commands from earth, and the resulting signals received on earth were used to predict the landing point accurately enough to go out and find it.

All this is explained in a paper by Boris Girshovich, presented at the National Space Society's 26th International Space Development Conference, Dallas Texas 2007May25-28. See isdc.nss.org/2007/index.html.

Also I found an online paper in the Electronic Journal of the Astronomical Society of the Atlantic, Vol. 7, Nr. 1, Jan 1996, by Andrew J. LePage. He points out that the return capusle was essentially just falling almost straight toward earth, and notes that they had to land near 56 degrees east longitude on the moon, in order to make the simplified return scheme work. The ascent vehicle is said to be 520 kg total, roughly 300 kg of which would have to be expended propellant. The sample return capsule is described as 40 kg total and 50 cm in diameter, which suggests that the "3 feet" diameter noted by the Girshovich paper is a typo.

John W.

The capsule was certainly not 3 feet in diameter. The overall width of the full craft including legs was about 3.3m diameter, and from images you can gauge the small size of the capsule. Here it is said to be 25 cm dimater, which seems about right to me...

Luna missions details

I know mechanical means sound archaic, but similar concepts are used in MEMS devices these days... like in the Wii video game controller. Ok, it's really an 'accelerometer' but as long as you're accelerating away from the moon, same difference. Just think on the pendulum being a few dozen microns in area.

Good point, 3.3 m is the diameter to fit in the Proton launch vehicle fairing. Scaling from 3 different images & diagrams with a ruler suggests to me that the earth entry capsule was in the range 40 to 50 cm diameter. This is consistent with the paper by Andrew LePage (see my Nov14 posting), which includes the most details that I've seen. His mass and dimensional data are in agreement, based on scaling the ascent propellant tanks which works out to about 300 kg ascent propellant for a 520-kg vehicle. But it would be nice to also find such a detailed paper authored by a Russian!

John W.

I checked today the old broken link, and met me a nice surprise.
Lunokhod 2 Panoramas
I wish you all a pleasant evening.

Crater Le Monnier viewed from Apollo
Click to view attachment

I wonder what prompted this release?

Way cool. I sucked them all down to my hard drive in case the link should go bad again

Does anybody have any recommendations on how to take the bend out of these images?

They have been talking about this for years. When I was in Russia I heard stories of finding the tapes in the State archives and carring them back on public transit to the institute. Then the tape reader would only operate in the winter, it got too hot in the summer (I think it was that way round). And they also spoke of setting up the equivalent of a PDS node to distribute their old data. Lack of funding delayed it for years. Maybe this is the start of it.

Warning: at least some, probably all, raw Lunokhod panoramas are reversed left to right. If you try to match topographic features you have to flip them.

Phil

Maybe this:
(clicked "main" on the panorama page, then "news")

The 50-th Vernadsky/Brown Microsymposium on Comparative Planetology

Under sponsorship of Russian Foundation of Basic Research
October 12-14, 2009, Moscow Russia

Organized by Vernadsky Institute and Brown University

What a nice surprise! I can't wait to try to match the panoramas to the traverse maps ;-) It would also be nice to see them on Google Moon.

The only thing I don't like is that the images are water marked. That will make further processing difficult.

Panoramas 12 and 13 in that link (click page 3) seem to form an almost perfect stereo pair. Both are centered at the lander, and so after some basic adjustments I was able to produce this stereo pair of it in 40% of the original size, for crossed-eyes viewing.

Yep. Same here.

Photoshop has a tool that will do that.

That is fantastic, marswiggle, thanks a million. Would it be worth doing the left-right flip Phil mentioned to make that 3D even more like the real thing? (I may try that if I can find out how.)

Before I clicked on the image, I could have sworn I was looking at a dinosaur.

Fantastic stuff - I'm showing my age, no doubt, but I get quite the nostalgic glow at that peculiarly Soviet-era Russian low-contrast shades-of-grey style of images; it would be really nice if there was any way to extract sharper versions from the images as released (although I doubt that's practical.) Also really cool to see rover tracks on a surface other than Mars

I wonder if there's any way to communicate our collective delight and gratitude for this release back to those responsible?

The site gives an e-mail address: atbas @ geokhi.ru

Yes, that is Alexander (Sasha) Basilevsky, a veteran of planetary science in Russia. He worked on Lunokhod, as well as helping plan human landing sites before the Soviet lunar landing program was cancelled.

Phil

Wow, these images are incredible.
Imagine if we (UMSF) could get a hold of the raw images and reprocess them.
Very cool project indeed

I thought I'd have a play with one image just to clean it up and 'artistically' fill in some gaps.
Please, oh, please someone release the full, un-watermarked images to us.

1) artistic clean-up
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2) original
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Wow Astro0 that is an absolutely stunning image once its cleaned up! I'm going right back up this thread to do my own data 'suckage'

I always wondered what panoramas from this potentially spectacular part of the Moon would look like, without really expecting to ever see much of this dataset. And now we can!

P

Can anyone tell us how far away and how high those mountains are ?
Thanks.

Different parts of the rim of Le Monnier crater are visible in different images. The prominent highlands in some of the early views are Le Monnier Alpha, the southwestern part of the rim of the crater facing into Mare Serentiatis. They are 30 km away and (from this map:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatal...lm42/150dpi.jpg

about 1200 m high.

See also this earlier version of the map which names the hill:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatal...ac42/150dpi.jpg

Phil

Quickish question for all the loonies here. How common is regolith that looks more like gravel like this?

Really impressive work, Astro0. The expresion "artistic clean-up" seems quite reductive to me because, apart from the two vertical dark bands and the shadowed spacecraft portion, it seems quite rigorous... A question: where did you take the spacecraft details in the left portion? (they seems completely black in the original image!)

I'm guessing it's just an artifact of the low-res/low-contrast imaging. To my eyes, it looks more or less the same as any other lunar site I've seen (maybe I need to get my eyes checked?).

Dilo asked: Where did you take the spacecraft details in the left portion?
I pulled it out of another panorama in this set of wonderful images.

stevesliva asked: How common is regolith that looks more like gravel like this?
As Gsnorgathon said, I think it's more to do with the lowres/lowcontrast image presented here.
In the full version the surface is typical of the fine regolith and distribution of rocks seen elsewhere.

Thanks for the answer, Astro0.

I checked today link to "Laboratory for comparative planetology", and again met me a nice surprise.
Lunokhod 1 Panoramas


Click to view attachment
Courtesy Vincent Meens

Supercool! I particularly like the 3rd day "return to home" images of the spent lander and the late day dark panoramas

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

Click to view attachment

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.

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

THANKS!!!!!

Click to view attachment

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".

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

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.

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

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.

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

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