Does anyone have images of the Moon produced by the Soviet Luna 19 and Luna 22
lunar orbiters? Wikipedia has images of the vehicles themselves, but no images of the Moon.

Also, it appears that the Luna 19 and 22 orbiters were Lunakhod vehicles with
no wheels, still attached to their propulsion stage.

The Wikipedia entries are as follows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_19

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_22


Another Phil

Back to the Luna 3 images... I wasn't happy with my previous results, because the images had a significant vertical stripe pattern... This prevented the noise reduction filters from working and always found it's way on the final processed images.
So I managed to get rid of it and reprocessed all the avaliable images.
Finally I made a new global mosaic and put a little picture of the spacecraft :-) !
I'm very very happy with this results!

Here you have all of my work: the processed individual frames and the final mosaic

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Ricardo:

Great work!

Do you think any of those frames would work as animated .gif files?

Bob Shaw

Beautiful!

Dificult to say... there's some perspective change along the image sequence, but not much. Mainly just image distortion and rotation.
Also, the noise on the original images is so high that you would have a hard time seeing much on an animation.

Anyway, don't use my processed images for that, because I used simple circle as a the Moon's limb to position and trim the images.

Beautiful work. If I ever can get my hands on the photographs or the signal, I will let you know!

I'm assuming that you're starting with the images published by Lipsky in the Atlas I and II, yes?




Yes, the "heavy luna orbiters" were built in Lunokhod shells, but the camera system was especially made for these missions, a fish-eye linear camera with a rotating prism scanner and photomulitplier tube. The quality of the images was not bad.

Phil Stooke can tell you more than anyone else about this. I know the Luna-22 orbiter was maneuvered into a circular orbit only 25 km above the surface, for sensitive measurements of mass concentrations. The Moon is very "lumpy". The cameras were used in part to get horizon lines during these orbits.

You can find some of the images in my catalog: Soviet Catalog. The Luna-22 panoramas are pieced together from films scanned by Phil Stooke.

The Luna 19 and 22 cameras were not great from a scientific point of view. The images were low resolution - Luna 19 aparently better at maybe 50 to 100 m/pixel at the nadir. Luna 22 a bit coarser. But I am not very knowledgeable about the instruments themselves - that's where Don knows much more.

The cameras scanned from horizon to horizon, and (as Shevchenko told me at Sternberg) from terminator to terminator. That may have been the capability, but it's not clear the full-length pans were ever obtained. Maybe only short sections were scanned. The images are fine under the spacecraft but extremely foreshortened at the horizon. Jeanna Rodionova sent me some scans of printed illustrations in which L22 images were reprojected into mapping geometry. I've done some of that too. There were only 5 panoramic images from Luna 19 and 10 from Luna 22. I think of this as experimental imaging, maybe to help design cameras for future planetary missions. It contributes nothing to lunar science and was not adequate for landing site selection.

My big question was: what areas were imaged? (When you're making an atlas, everything looks like a map.) Shevchenko refused to let me copy anything - he showed me negatives of the L22 images, but nothing I didn't later find at Flagstaff and scan for Don. I had the impression they had never mapped coverage themselves. So began a quest - find everything that was published, project it into map form and locate it on a map to create coverage maps for these missions. Don helped me find a few images, I found some for him. We found about five images from each mission, some good, some awful. One I had to scan off a microfilm copy of Izvestiia in our library. There are published statements about the areas imaged by each mission online - they are incorrect.

I think I posted those maps in a remote corner of this forum, if anyone cares to search for them. If I didn't I will soon. Needless to say, this is all going into my book, which is in the final stages of editing now.

Phil

Yeah, Kira has been trying to get the Luna-3 images from him. Sigh...

Interesting. One of the side revelations from that very informative Sept. 2000 "JBIS" article on the 1963-68 Soviet Luna missions is that the first evidence of the lunar mascons actually came from tracking of Luna 10, not Lunar Orbiter 1. (The article also claims that Luna 10's gamma-ray spectrometer, rather than Surveyor 5, provided the first evidence of the Moon's basaltic composition -- but I remember reading at the time that the Soviets' early conclusion was that it had shown the moon to be granitic instead. But then, I've always been highly suspicious of the accuracy of Soviet scientific instruments -- also including their initial interpretation of Venera 8's gamma-ray data as granite.)

The conclusion from Luna-10 was that the Moon was basaltic. The instrument was a 32-channel analyzer connected to a sodium iodide scintillator. The crystal was enclosed in an anti-coincidence shield for the elimination of charged-particle counts. Spectra were obtained at many orbital positions, to compare the mare and "continental" lunar crust. A year earlier, an overall gamma spectrum of the Moon was measured from an Earth orbiting satellite, the stranded E-6 probe, Kosmos-60.

The gamma spectrometers on Venera-8 to Vega were identical instruments, so the unusual spectrum from the Venera-8 site is not assumed to be "incorrect". With so few places on the surface of Venus sampled, it is entirely possible that there is variation in the composition of its crust.

The energy spectrum measured by these devices includes the three signatures of Potassium, Uranium and Thorium, the only three naturally occuring radioactive elements. Background levels are measured before approaching the Moon or Venus, to eliminate the effect of braking x-rays caused by cosmic rays colliding with the hull of the spacecraft. They are also calibrated against samples of terrestrial rocks of course, where the ratios of K U Th are well known.

Don, could you please fill in a few more details about Kosmos-60? I knew it was stranded in Earth orbit, but I didn't know it had been able to make lunar observations.

By the way, it's good to have you here!

Phil

There's a paper by Vinogradov in Moon and Planets. Kosmos-60 was a Luna-8 style probe, which was stranded in its parking orbit due to a block-L malfunctioned. It carried a multichannel gamma-ray spectrometer. It wasn't in the lander, it must have been in the spacecraft bus.

The paper is mostly dealing with data that is very noisy, since it was designed to get a lot closer to the Moon, obviously. The Russians did a lot of experiments with particle accelerators, calibrating this instrument to see what kinds of cosmogenic isotopes would be created in lunar basalt and in the spacecraft hull, so they could separate that signal from the natural radioisotope (K, U, Th) radiation from the Moon. They make cautious statements about the actual data being consistant with their calculations and accelerator simulations; that is, a combination of cosmogenic and lunar isotopes.

According to JANE'S SOLAR SYSTEM LOG (Andrew Wilson, Jane's Publishing, Inc.,
New York, 1987), the surface around Venera 8's landing site at Navka Planitia could
be a rare form of basalt, one with high potassium levels.

I like the term "anti-coincidence shield". Has so many potential uses.

Yes, and in fact sodium and potassium rich lavas melt easily, so they may be the cause of the long channels. Remember, material that are dissolved in the ocean on Earth (chlorides, alkali metals, etc) are just "rocks" on Venus. Or they are gasses (a lot of metal chorides boil well below Venusian surface temperature). What a place!

"Anti-Coincidence Shield" is a good one. My favorite not-made-up scientific term is "Quantum Nondemolition Oscillator", heard at a physics talk on gravity waves at Caltech.

When charged particles go through a detector, they leave a trail of ionization, like you see in a cloud chamber or bubble chamber photo. But photons, such as gamma rays, pass through material with no effect until they interact entirely with a single atom. So if you surround a detector with other detectors, you can filter out gamma-ray events, by picking only events that trigger the inner detector but not the surrounding ones. The first such device for Venus surface gamma-ray study was installed on the failed 1962 2MV lander.

This is also why you don't want to spend years in interplanetary space, charged-particle cosmic radiation is really really bad for you.

PhilHorzempa asked about Luna 19 and Luna 22 images.

Go here:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...1106&hl=luna+22

Phil

There's been quite a lot written recently by Basilevsky about the Venera findings in perspective, and he does indeed agree that what Venera 8 actually detected was a relatively high-silica basalt. In fact, the last I heard, he thought it might very well have landed on one of Venus' numerous "pancake domes", which seem to be made of a particularly viscous lava which is probably therefore silica-rich. Felsic -- that is, granitic or silica-rich -- lava is somewhat paradoxical: it melts at a considerably lower temperature than "mafic" (e.g., basalt-type) lava, but after the latter actually does melt it's far runnier and less viscous than felsic lava.

Here's an updated Zond 3 mosaic. I did some reprojection of the images and was able to expand the coverage a little bit.

I also used the same "de-stripping" processing as in the Luna 3 images do clean the pictures.

A brighness gradient was added in Photoshop, along with some color and a picture of the spacecraft.

Looks nice ;-)

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Wow! Great work!

Is that the eastern rim of the South Pole-Aitken basin I can see to the left of Orientale?

Grande trabalho caro concidadão!

I think that has to be the first Russian image where I have actually been able to tell what I was looking at. Great work!!

The biggest problem with Soviet images is that we see images damaged by generational loss. The Russians have a first-generation copy of analog or digital image data. Then it gets copied to film, then printed, then descreened and printed again in the West, then scanned by someone, and finally we have a horribly image.

Here is an example, Venera-9's panorama, as it appeares in many Western media, a USGS film recording from Russia, and properly processed original digital data:

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Check this out - a scale model of Luna 24 complete with actual lunar surface
samples attached to the base:

http://www.maxuta.biz/luna_24_soil/

It was a gift to some guy named Leonid Brezhnev for his 70th birthday in 1976.

And it's actually a model of the Luna 16-20 versions, but what the hey.

I've encountered Soviet Moon samples for sale, usually in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. Caveat Emptor! That's a lot of money to spend for a grain of black rock, which may just be a pebble pried out of someone's shoe.

One thing I have spent some money on are the limited edition spacecraft pennants. Planetary and Lunar landers all had a pennant attached to them, and a few hundred of these would be made and distributed to top officials and engineers. They're hard to find, and generally go for about $1000 a piece.

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I have a small collection of Soviet Pennants and stamps, some space, some not. Most I bought from streat vendors in the old East in the 1990s.

I have looked through this thread and other Luna threads on UMSF, but have
not found any "official" explanation of what happened to the Sample-Return missions
that didn't return, i.e., Lunas 15, 18 and 23. I have heard the usual stories
about the end of each of these missions.

However, do we really KNOW what happened to Lunas 15, 18 and 23?

For example, we have all read that Luna 15 crashed while attempting to land in July 1969.
However, why did it crash? Was it hardware, software, terrain?

The same goes for Luna 18 and Luna 23. Did Luna 18 actually crash, and if so,
then why? Was it descending too rapidly?

As for Luna 23, the "official" explanation for its lack of return is that
the drill mechanism was damaged. Was this a cover story meant to hide some
engineering embarrassment such as an ascent engine that would not ignite?


Another Phil

There is a wealth of technical detail about many mission failures, written in the 1980s and 1990s, after conditions were more liberalized. I don't believe those accounts are dishonest.

I imagine what they really KNOW about Luna-15 is that the telemetry signal ended abruptly. Followed by some colorful words in the control room (and believe me, Russian is colorful).

Sorry for taking so long for this reply. However, could you provide
information on where the "wealth of technical detail" has been published.
Spaceflight? JBIS? Russian books?


Another Phil

The wealth of information is in Russian. There are textbooks that describe how rocket and radio telemetry systems work in detail, there are biographies, collections of all of Korolev's memos, thousands of scientific journal papers about individual experiements -- some are translated in Cosmic Research but many are not, especially the earlier ones. I have two file cabinets filled with journal papers.

There is no royal road I guess. But if you can read Russian, start with Boris Chertok's four books. The first of them has been translated into English already, and the rest will be eventually. In English, I would absolutely recommend reading Asif Siddiqi's two volumes, but it is mostly about the manned space programs. There just isn't a good comprehensive work on Soviet unmanned probes in English or Russian. Basically taht's what I've been up to, for the Venus probes, writing a book.

The only thing you cannot find in writing is information about the very early MV, 2MV and 3MV experiments. I've relied mostly on interviews with the few remaining scientists for that, in particular Lebedinsky's young assistants.

I wouldn't bank on conspiracy theories and "cover stories" by the way. I see little evidence for that. The soviets often said nothing about a flight, but I know of no case where their scientists lied.

I have just made a polar pan of Luna 13's landing site - here it is:

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North is at the top.

Phil

Cool...I did something similar with Luna-9 a while back. However, I never recentered it, so it has the same problems as the original pan. It helps to get a feel for the site, considering the way the tilt of the spacecraft effects the appearance of the panoramas.

Very cool. Can't wait to see your book, Phil.

Thanks. Book update: It's finished. The last entries were the SMART-1 impact and a comment on LCROSS targets. I'm getting a foreword written by - a well-known person - as the last thing to plug in. I am trying to nail down the last permissions to publish material - from Russia (Don will understand that). Some of my colleagues here on UMSF get a big thank-you in the acknowledgements. Then it's file formatting time, and off to the Publisher in November.

All this would be fine if I hadn't been asked to write something for the History of Cartography project as well! - in the same time frame. And you can't turn down a request like that.

Phil

Here's the Luna 9 counterpart. A rougher landscape. But you can see the pan covers about 2/3 of the horizon, and large (Taurus-Littrow scale) mountains are not visible. The point usually indicated as the landing point has to be wrong for that reason. The landing site must be further north, out on the mare surface.

Phil

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"I'd like to thank the members of UMSF without whom this book would have been finished a good deal sooner"



Doug

Yeah, scary stuff. There is a hidden wealth of photographic history in Russia, and trying to find it and get permission ot use it is unbelievably hard.

What software are you using for editing the book? I'm doing final layout myself, so I checked out demo versions of the major contenders. In particular, I was concerned about the visual quality of text justification and hyphenation.

1. Quark Express - Very nice and easy to use. Just expensive and not what I'm used to.
2. Adobe InDesign - Incomprehensibe interface. I couldn't even figure out how to start a new document.
3. Word 2003 - Familiar and rock-solid stable(unlike older versions of Word!).
4. Open Office - Did exactly the same typography as Word. Holy reverse engineering, Batman!

I ended up using Word 2003. Discovering the Wordperfect text-justification compatability mode was key. Word's native typography settings are a little ragged when columns get narrower, but in Wordperfect mode it seems just as good as QE or ID.

Of course I violate all the rules about how you are suppose to write a book. I've just typed the book in as final camera-ready layout, adding photos and everything as I go. Why? Because its more fun that way.

Don - just Word. Cambridge does all the page setup, I provide unformatted text and 400 separate image files!

Phil

Phil,

Is there any chance you would consider authoring a book on small Solar System bodies at some point in the future? From Phobos and Deimos, to the co-orbital moons of Saturn, I'm sure it would be a fascinating read!

Ian.

Oddly enough I have considered that. But unfortunately I want to do more than anyone can do in a lifetime, and I don't know if that one will get done. My next plan is Venus and Mars...

Phil

Need an extra writer for some utility work? I'm free after Sept 2007 once my master's degree is done...still gonna be in writing mode after my thesis is complete.

Phil... absolutely INSIST on final galley proofs.

My brother had an article published in the book in Solar Power Satellites, edited by Dr. Peter Glaser (inventor of the SPS idea), published (I think) by Elsevier. He sent his editor a "contingency copy" labled "do not publish", just in case some catastrophy prevented him from making the submission deadline.

He then submitted the final copy, on time, with extensive improvement and additions to some parts (a month's work).

They didn't send galley proofs. Said they weren't needed... (where nothing can go worng, Worng, WORNG!)

They published the WRONG VERSION

The CHOPPED THE TITLE HEADERS OFF ALL HIS GRAPHS AND FIGURES, and didn't include them in the captions.

He's still screaming.. years later. <almost>

Good point, ed... and thanks everyone for your support.

Phil

I hope that the Luna 16 and 24 panoramas are in there. Don't give me the little "It landed on the night side" and "It didn't have a camera" arguments. Seeing what you have pulled out of the Surveyor images, you should be able to find your way around this pretty well.

Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, there are rumored to be some scans from Luna 16 in which a few vague features can be seen, probably in earthshine. But I have never seen these, and my source, one of the Russian scientists, was not reliable (not in the sense that he was lying, but in the sense that he said that he was pretty sure the scans he was talking about were from Luna 16, but he wasn't sure, and had no idea whether those scans, if they do indeed exist, might be today).

Don Mitchell also reported that information about the Luna 16 image. I would love to get my hands on the Luna 16 image data - with modern methods we UMSF types could perform miracles with it. But whether we could ever find them ... who can say? I've been invited to write a paper for "Russian Cosmonautics" and I might have to use it to promote the historical value of finding these things...

Phil

Did you have any luck digging up Luna-20 imagery? I have some, but it my scans are of the same images as Don Mitchell's. I am hoping there is a more complete pan out there somewhere.

Didn't one of the Luna sample return missions land hard and damage it's sampling arm, but continued to work on the lunar surface before the batteries ran down or something? Did that one get any images?.. #18 or #20 or so?... One of the three <?> that tried to get samples in the highlands south of Crisium?

Lunas 15, 16, 18 and 20 carried twin cameras mounted on either side of the hinged sampling mechanism, to provide a stereo view of the sampling area. Each camera viewed a strip extending from the sampling area to the horizon on its side of the sampler. By combining the two you could get a full pan.
Alas - 15 crashed, 16 landed at night (and its lights failed), 18 crashed... but 20 did return images. I have several, including a tiny fragment of a pre-sampling image, and two views after sampling, as well as both horizon fragments.

After that the drill was redesigned - being out on a hinged arm it couldn't apply enough pressure to work effectively. The new drill was bolted to the side of the vehicle. Its extra weight meant the camera had to be removed. Also the old drill could swing sideways a bit to avoid a rock if needed, hence the value of a camera to look for hazards, but it wasn't needed with this fixed drill. Luna 23 landed hard and couldn't drill... but there was no camera. Luna 24 worked, but no camera.

Phil

I was told by Arnold Selivanov that Luna-16 returned images with a few bright objects visible. Unlike the Venus/Mars missions, the Lunar images were transmitted as an analog video signal, and I seriuosly doubt that those tapes could be found or read today.