Slashdot Mirror
Russian Rovers on the Moon
An Ignorant American writes "Perusing an Air & Space magazine the other day, I came across an article about Russian Moon Rovers during the space-race era. Thanks to my American science education, I had never heard of this feat. I asked around (friends and coworkers) and nobody else I've talked to has heard of them either. They were called 'lunokhod', and were the first of their kind. Unmanned, remotely operated rovers with basic instrumentation. Two were successfully landed on the Moon, each driving for many miles on the Moon's surface, returning tens of thousands of pictures. You can do a Google Search to start your education, or read what they have to say at Wikipedia on the subject (Wikipedia also has some external links.)"
Click here to find out the true story of Russia's first space "rover", almost 50 years ago.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Also look at the pictures (images.google.com)
candidly
in czech republic (fromer soviet ally) was a small model lunokchod with remote control. all people in eastern europ know lunokchods. i am surprised it is not known in usa, because american exploration of space was well known in the eastern block.
by th way, Lunochod means Moonwalker
SHE does throw dice.
These rovers were far from secret - they even carried a joint experiment with the French, a set of retroreflectors for Lunar Laser Ranging, which (together with similar retroreflectors installed by the Apollo astronauts) are still used for a variety of fundamental measurements in celestial dynamics.
--Chag
FYI: "Lunokhod" mean "moonwalker" in russian (They should sue Michael Jackson)
As for name, russian engineering projects are most often named after the lead engineer or location where they are made (common for russian planes and cars, like MiG actually is a shortened version of Mikoyan-Gurevich - names of the design team leads)
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Does anyone remember that the US landed three rovers on the moon that were driven by astronauts?
"U.S. astronauts drove three Lunar Rover Vehicles on the last three Apollo missions..."
And if you are in Kansas, you can see them st the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
This isn't because of proximity to the Earth or gravity or more solar power or anything. The Mars rovers move so slow because one of their mission parameters was that they would not be "torque bound". They wanted them to be able to roll over any obstacle. The motors are made with a power/speed tradeoff so while they are very slow, there's very little that they cannot climb.
Blaze a trail to the New World
One I hear repeated often is that the first woman in space was Sally Ride in June 1983. Sadly, this isn't just a US misconception, as it was one I was taught in Australia too.
It completely ignores Valentina Tereshkova, a russian woman who was not only the first woman in space 20 years earlier (almost to the day, in June 1963) but was about the sixth person into space entirely (I may have that position slightly wrong)
The reliable Soyuz rocket in use today was designed by Sergei Korolev, who was a brilliant rocket engineer who, like Wernher von Braun, dreamed of building rockets that could send people into space. He died in the mid-1960s, however, so his second-in-command designed the giant N-1 -- and the N-1's first stage had many, many small rockets powering it rather than a smaller number of large ones, as in the Saturn V. It's believed (according to a mid-90s NOVA program on the Soviet manned lunar effort, and other sources) that the sheer complexity of the N-1 was largely to blame for the failures.
How the cosmonauts really felt hasn't been addressed much if at all in any of the books or web sites I've read, nor have any documentaries.
i am a soviet space shuttle
...as if this was supposed to be some sort of huge secret or something!
I remember visiting the Science and Tech Museum here in Ottawa way back in 1977, the 60th anniversary of the USSR. The Soviets had an exhibition of their space program, including a model Vostok and Sputnik 1, some stuff about the recently completed Apollo/Soyuz joint mission...and a model Lunokhod, which ran on a little track on a grayish moon surface. Most interesting! Somewhere, I still have a brochure or two from it.
So this was hardly any sort of secret, the USSR being very solvent at the time.
Don't forget Luna 16 which had a descent and
ascent stage and retrieved a lunar soil sample
which it brought back to Earth in Sept. 1970
Luna 16
Also don't forget Luna 15. Just two hours
before the Apollo 11 Eagle was due to lift
off from the Moon, Luna 15 crash-landed
into the Moon's surface. It's job had been
to robotically retrieve soil samples which
could well have trumped Apollo 11 in doing so
and without risking human lives.
Those old of us to vividly remember the
Apollo 11 landing will also recollect the
drama surrounding Luna 15 right up until the
last moment.
After Apollo 11 successfully landed, the Soviet lunar program was classified for many years and not publicly acknowledged until the laet 1990s
A lot of the moon-related exploration stuff was available to public - just visit the space museum in Moscow. Some parts of the exhibitions from the 1980s are, I believe, still there.
Jobs? Which jobs?
There is an unused Lunokhod rover here in the states. Here is a color picture I took a few years ago. The rover is/was at the Kansas Cosmosphere. The Cosmosphere is a wonderful place, and well worth making a road trip.
The top of the rover popped open lengthwise to reveal the solar panels. The long nose looking thing on the front was the antenna. There are rumors that these rovers did sample returns even. Havn't seen any proof though.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
Get a clue. You desperately need it.
They did. It was started at the same time as US. While the US was from inception and till now intended as a manned system and requires 7 guinea pigs to fly (and die), the russian from inception was designed to run in fully automated mode if needed. It can also carry as many people as the US one, but it took off and landed automatically day one.
It went through a number of prototypes which were considerably smaller then the shuttle and can land on both sea and ground. There are publically available pictures taken from New Zeland destroyer of russians retrieving one of the prototypes after a water landing in the South Pacific in the late 70-es.
The program developement ended with the Buran which had the same spec as the shuttle and could still fly in fully automated mode (take off, dock, land). It completed one fully automatic space flight and landed successfully. On the second flight with crew on board the system malfunctioned at a similar time in the take off sequence like the Challenger. The main difference between the Challenger and Buran was the fact that the Buran had a working ejector system and the crew escaped unharmed. Which makes a remarkable difference compared to the shuttle. And it was not kept secret. It was in the news and well known.
After that incident the powers that be finally did an economical analysis of the program and found that it is completely unviable. The reason being that copying the shuttle was wrong. The shuttle was designed to satisfy several silly USAF requirements and as a result was and still is too big for our rocket technology. The early prototypes were right. We cannot build a reusable vehicle larger then about 30% of the shuttle and keep it reliable.
And the funniest bit is that one of the prototypes for the new NASA vehicle is a literal copy of these prototypes. Compare the Kiwi pictures of the real thing from the 70-es and the NASA material. Actually nothing funny - it is the reality. Same as with the Yak 142 technology making its way into the next generation of US VTL fighter jet, so on so forth. I would not go into why and what as it will be marked as a flamebait though they are well known as well.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
That was part of the problem, Korolev who designed the N1 died before the it could be test fired and Mishin who followed him was not in the same league.
N1 was only one of three designs of heavy launch rockets designed by the Soviets (they never designed a specific Moon rocket). It was chosen in preference to a design known as UR700 which would have been far simpler to construct and more reliable. The UR700's smaller brother became the highly successful Proton rocket which is still used and was at one point planned to launch a lunar manned orbiter.
But perhaps the most serious set-back that the Soviets had to face was that they never built a test stand for the N1 (Apollo built one in Mississippi), so the only way of determining its performance was to stack the rocket on the pad and fire the engines.
Four attempts, four different reasons for failure, but by then the N1 was so late that the propaganda advantage of manned missions to the Moon had been lost. The Politburo cancelled the programme just before the fifth launch attempt which the engineers believed would have succeeded.
Best wishes,
Mike.