There is a new Science Channel program on the Soviet lunar rover premiering on Tuesday 2/12 in the US:

Tank on the Moon
http://science.discovery.com/tv/tank/tank.html

Thanks for alerting us to this. I didn't even realize that I got Science Channel on my cable system until I saw your note and then looked it up!

As with many of the programs on Discovery Science, I have a bit of a problem with the way they have been promoting it.

"See the super-secret Moon program the Soviets never told anyone about -- until now!"

Pardon me, but the world was well aware of the Lunakhod missions at the time. The Soviets trumpeted their successes. In fact, I recall quite clearly during the network coverage of the Apollo 14 landing that the Soviets tossed out a press release as Shepard and Mitchell began their 3+ km trek to and from Cone Crater that Lunakhod 1 had already covered many times that distance in its journeys...

I'm happy to see a decent documentary on the Lunakhods -- but let's please not sell it as some super secret that we're only now finding out about. Let's at least try for a little pravilna...

-the other Doug

Well, I've watched the piece twice, now. My instant assessment is that about 20% of it is good and interesting, and 80% is an attempt to artificially generate drama where none existed.

There were some very nice things in the piece. Especially interesting were filmed sequences from within the Lunakhod driving facility, where the real-time TV images the drivers used to navigate the vehicles were seen in tantalizing, shadowy, bar-flipping snatches in the background. Fairly well done were the landing, drive-off and roving animations.

However -- if you listen to this documentary, the Soviets had two and only two programs in place to try and challenge the American assault on the Moon: the manned program (illustrated only by N-1 launch failure footage) and the Lunakhod program. No mention whatsoever of the sample return program, and only about 12 seconds of mention of other Soviet lunar probes (specifically, Luna 9). In fact, they mention the lauinch failure of the first Lunakhod attempt in early 1969, and then stated that while the Americans landed on the Moon, the Soviets were preparing a second Lunakhod as their response. Ummm... no mention of the attempt to grab a sample and return it while Apollo 11 was in flight? Really!

The writers would have you believe that the Soviets felt that wheel tracks on the Moon were a massively more impressive achievement than footprints. The writers also seemed to *share* the disappointment of the Soviet Politburo when they say that the Lunakhod achievements brought worldwide acclaim to the engineers and technicians who brought off the missions, but didn't impress anyone with the ability of the Communist system to do such wondrous things.

There were other almost offensive statements -- things like stating that a roving vehicle on another planet was a concept that the Americans never even dreamed of trying to accomplish for more than 20 years after the Soviets did it. I guess their writers never saw the plans for roving Surveyors and Vikings...

Also, unlike the information given by Alexei Leonov, who trained to land on the Moon, not a single word was spent on the concept that the Lunakhod was originally developed as a personal conveyance for a moonwalking cosmonaut. Indeed, you'd never know from this show that the Russians planned to use a Lunakhod to check out a manned landing site and provide a radar beacon for the Luniy Korabl as it descended, much less that it would then provide mobility for Leonov and his followers-on to rove around the surface.

Finally, on a more personal level of irritation, the narrator made the decision that the "kh" construction in Russian is pronounced by totally omitting the "k" sound. He called the probes "Lunahod" throughout the program. I may not be an expert in how to pronounce Russian, but I was always under the impression that the "k" was indeed pronounced, with something of a glottal stop added by the "h". It just made it sound like they were discussing a lunar brick carrier and not a "Moon walker," as the writers translated it.

All in all, some good, new information and views... but so overwhelmed with revisionist history and self-congratulatory backslapping that it rates only about a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10.

-the other Doug

I'm not sure you're right here. I know the Russians write it "lunohód", without "k", but I don't know exactly, how do they spell it.

It's taken me ages to figure out how to say ' Saa Yoooz ' . Luna cod (which is what I've said) may need more research :0

I bet Jim Oberg would know.

Doug

The pronunciation is more akin to "Lunochod," but with the "ch" starting out rather hard and the "h" carrying over into the last syllable - almost "Lunoch-hod."

I largely agree with DVandorn's comments. Of course, the bulls__t about secret program is just that. I have a NTIS <government printing office> xerox of a NASA translation of what's approximately the Lunokhod 1 mission report from about 1973 to 75.

The program did mention the launch failure of the first mission. Without web digging or browsing through books that are not at hand....I'm wondering: With 2 mission successes, how many launch failures were there with lunokhods on board? The Proton back then had a worse than poor reliability record.

What really frustrated me about the Lunokhods was the rudimentary nature of the scientific instrumentation and the science return. The effort went into engineering marvels and ran dry when it came to science instruments, and evaporated almost entirely when it came to analysis. The geologic science return was inferior to Surveyor 1 alone in terms of systematic data analysis and interpretation. There was rudimentary sky photometry science that provided more info on the lunar dust atmosphere discovered by Surveyor 1, there was some engineering data from the penetrometer and vehicle/surface interaction, there was limited chemistry data on soil mixing between mare and highland at the Lunokhod 2 site, but almost nothing that was really new, interesting or distinctive.

... and as an aside, the VeGa 1 & 2 spacecraft to Venus and Comet Halley were called that rather than VeHa (Venera-Halley) because there isn't an H sound in Russian; the closest is an aspirated G.

I asssume that VeGa was pronounced Vecha; can anyone confirm?

No.

At slightly more length - the mission name VeGa was pronounced a lot like English Vega. I always thought G was an odd choice to approximate English H, instead of "kh", until I learned that there are accents in Russian (such as one from the south, toward the Caucasus) in which the G sound is softened to a pretty close approximation of our H sound. I've heard that, when he was tired or distracted, Gorbachev could sound closer to Horbachev.

If anyone wants a fun piece of (likely fake) memorabilia, you can get a Lunakhod 24-hour wristwatch off of evilBay here. Even if it's fake, it's a fun conversation piece.

Sounds like standard 'flash n trash' to me, unfortunately that seems to be the case with rather too many documentaries these days.



Or, this 1963 design for a Saturn 1b launched rover to be used for site survey work/component testing.

See: Study of a site survey payload for a 1500 pound class lunar logistic system (3.5mb).

But then if you can't 'google it' it's not worth knowing these days...

Sorry, all wrong!

As a native Russian speaker, I feel compelled to correct several common misconceptions, all of which seem to have appeared on this thread.

First, Russian does have a sound "kh". It is not a harsh sound like in Hebrew or German, but is identical to H in "hat". Standard Russian does not have a glottal stop, although some dialects in southern Russia do. "Lunokhod" is pronounced "Loono-HOD", with accent on last syllable. VeGa comet probe was spelled and pronounced that way because Edmund Halley's name and his comet are written as "Galley" in Russian, and pronounced "Gal-LEIGH". English names beginning with "Ha" or "Hu" (Humphrey, Hudson, etc.) often transliterate into Russian as "Ga" or "Gu" -- not because Russian lacks the appropriate sound, but because their correct prononciation sounds vulgar to a Russian ear.

Oh, and who came up with Chekhov's accent on Star Trek?? He pronounces all his "v" as "w", which is exactly backward. Russian has no "w" sound.

Thanks for clearing that up. When I explained it was like Lunoch-hod, with an exaggerated "H," I was basing it on what I learned from the individual who taught me most of the little bit of Russian I know. He is from Irkutsk, which isn't really southern, but is also not very central, so perhaps that had an affect - I could swear there was a faint hard sound of some sort at the end of the second syllable.

Slightly OT, but I feel applicable to mention in our remarkably international and diverse forum.

Regional accents & dialects are extremely difficult to master (except for Ugordan, I suspect! ) What little Korean I can still speak is easily understood by people from the Taegu and Pusan areas--where I learned it--but people from Seoul can't understand me very well at all. This is undoubtedly due to the compounding effect of my own western American accent superimposed over the regional accentuation that I learned; Korean speakers from other regions must perform two levels of interpolation, which is far from easy.