Russian Rovers on the Moon

Robots had another purpose by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 10:42 · Score: 5, Interesting

An interesting fact is that while the Lunokhod robots transmitted more than 20,000 TV pictures and more than 200 TV panoramas and also conducted more than 500 lunar soil tests, their actual purpose was to try and find US made robots and/or buildings(!) on the surface of the moon.

This was done under a program name of "Timofeev". Timofeev is just a common Russian last name and seems to have no special meaning (not referring to a lead scientist/government official, etc).

Re:Robots had another purpose by strictnein · 2004-02-10 10:57 · Score: 4, Interesting

As odd as this may sound, I had an uncle who worked for a military listening station in eastern europe during the cold war. He had made mention to something along those lines at one time. I thought it sounded kind of odd, but it was definitely interesting. Other than talking to him about it, this is the first time I've ever seen/heard it mentioned.

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Re:Robots had another purpose by jarda · 2004-02-10 10:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

Also interesting is the fact that in Soviet Block, they were shown as a proof that USSR does care about pepole's lifes much more than US does, so rather than risking dnagerous human mission on the moon, they only sent robot, while astronauts stayed safely at home.

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"Two beers or not two beers. That's the question." -- Shakesbeer
Re:Robots had another purpose by Buran · 2004-02-10 12:02 · Score: 4, Interesting

The comments about the safety of the crews was pure propaganda and I didn't read it as the opinion of the poster. After Apollo 11 successfully landed, the Soviet lunar program was classified for many years and not publicly acknowledged until the laet 1990s -- little is known among the general public to this day of the giant N-1 booster (Saturn 5-class), the one-man lunar lander, the design elements in the Soyuz spacecraft that are leftovers from the days when Soyuz would have orbited the Moon, the N-1 launch failures, and many, many more elements of the program.

Why?

Because the Soviet leadership did not want to admit that it had failed to beat Project Apollo to a manned landing. So all those things were hidden, and the Soviets claimed that all along, they had focused on staying safely in Earth orbit, building space stations and sending automated probes to the Moon to drive around and send soil samples back (some probes in the Luna series were sample-return spacecraft) rather than letting humans do those things. Never mind that a human can do so much more on-site than he can in a control room a light-second away...

So please, don't tell the guy to shut up -- do a little reading first. The attitude did indeed exist -- but from the Soviet leadership, not someone commenting on an Internet message board decades after the fact.

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i am a soviet space shuttle
Re:Robots had another purpose by joggle · 2004-02-10 12:18 · Score: 2, Interesting

I once saw a documentary about the N-1. I agree that it failed due to its complexity. While the Russian engineers liked to reuse old designs, sometimes it can go too far. (If I remember correctly, the problem was fueling all of the mini-rockets at the exact same rate. If there were any fluctuations, the entire rocket would explode)
I believe I saw in the same documentary that the cosmonauts felt that the trip to the moon was a one-way trip due to the untested and underdesigned lunar module.
Re:Robots had another purpose by ckedge · 2004-02-10 13:56 · Score: 2, Interesting

> Instantly, Nedelin, his staff, their chairs, and over 100 technicians on the rocket were incinerated
Not entirely correct. There is black and white video footage of dozens of technicians running away from the fireball, all entirely aflame, before dropping to the ground.

It was only "instantly" for those right next to the rocket. Who knows how many burned alive over the course of a half minute or two.

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/r16_disaster.html
Re:Robots had another purpose by RaptorRed · 2004-02-10 23:45 · Score: 2, Interesting

The soviets fixed there fuelling and thrust balancing issuses in 1973 with the nk33 engines but the americans had already landed, so they tried to pretend that they had never tried to send a man there, hence the caring comment in above post. As a side note the finallly perfected engines for the N-1 the Nk33 and 43 are the most advanced and highest performance liquid O2/kerosene engines ever built and when they where ordered to be destroyed with the rest of the hardware, to aid the cover up, the enginners who built them hid them away. Then after the end of the cold war in the mid ninties an american firm scouting out russia for space services heard rumours of rocket engines with to them unbelievable performance figures, so they called there guides bluff and asked to see them, of course he took them to this desserted whearhouse and when they stepped inside one of the americans described the site as "a forrest of rocket engines as far as he could see in all directions" they took some back with them and tested them on an atlas 4 replacing its four smaller boosters with 1 nk33 it was 20% more efficient and prouduced 25% more thrust!

Hmm by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 10:44 · Score: 5, Interesting

I wonder what else american public schools forgot to teach me...

Re:Hmm by Galvatron · 2004-02-10 13:33 · Score: 2, Interesting

Why not, I wonder? Everyone else does.
Because we don't like it. Adults in America refuse to be forced to switch (road signs that listed both metric and imperial speed limits were used as target practice in some areas), and so long as the adults use the imperial system, children will grow up accustomed to it.
I personally would argue that for many human applications, the imperial system is better anyway. For example, temperatures in populated areas generally range from 0 (New England winter) to 100 (Los Angeles summer), with anything above or below being truly extreme, and even dangerous. Human heights generally range from 5 to 6 feet, although with today's nutrition, a man is more likely to be above 6' than a woman is likely to be below 5'. A cup is a reasonable approximation of how much liquid you would put in a medium sized cup. Teaspoons and tablespoons are similarly appropriate. Healthy human weights generally range from 100 to 200 lbs.
*shrug* All this may just be my brain's way of rationalizing the system I grew up with. For me though, the metric system does not offer enough of an advantage over the imperial system to cause me to want to switch. Think of it like Dvorak vs. QWERTY, the former might be better, but it's not enough better to justify the effort. I'm sure engineers would be better off if they were raised on metric, but what percentage of the US population is made up of engineers?

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"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Re:Hmm by KarMann · 2004-02-10 16:10 · Score: 2, Interesting

Shortly after the Columbia burned up, one of the related articles on CNN.com mentioned Sally Ride as "the first woman in space" for a time. I sent them a correction about it, and it was even actually fixed within a couple of hours. Hallelujah, maybe someone there actually does pay attention, if you rub their nose in it hard enough.

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ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.
Re:Hmm by jandrese · 2004-02-10 16:39 · Score: 2, Interesting

I recently heard something interesting. The recent explosion in short term (high interest) debt in the US may not be as bad as it first appears. Apparently this number is calculated in a method similar to credit reports. They grab the current amount of money on your credit card and compare that with various factors. However, in recent years many many Americans have taken to paying for most things with their credit card (to get the cash back/miles/etc...), and then paying off the credit card at the end of each month. In some ways this is smarter than using cash and checks. Unfortunatly banks can't seem to figure out how to account for this when figuring the amount of short term debt people actually have, and it's skewing the numbers.

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I read the internet for the articles.
Re:Hmm by IainHere · 2004-02-10 22:45 · Score: 2, Interesting

I met Tereshkova once. When I was about 14 (about 1993ish), I went to a "space school" at Brunel University in London ("reserve your seat of learning now") and she was the guest of honour.

In fact, she invited any of us to visit her if we were ever in Moscow, and said she lived at "Number 5, Red Square"!

"Thanks to my American Education?" by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 10:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

I'm not going to try and defend the US Education system for it's lack of bias, but I doubt that you learned about any US Mars Rovers in school either - even if they were current events. We have yet to talk about the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in my school... it's a shame really. :/

Ever wonder about the names? by immel · 2004-02-10 10:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

I can't believe you've never heard of this (even if you are American). Ever wonder why so many of the features on the dark side of the moon have Russian names? It's the same with many features on Mars, too.

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oh please by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 10:51 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'm American and I don't go to any fancy schools or anything. I just go to regular old public schools -- many of which weren't very good and I must have learned about this at least five different times. You just forgot it. I think my first memory of my teacher telling me about it is 4th grade.

Every single time that the space race was mentioned in a history class or whatever, there was always the "we put a man on the moon, the Soviets just sent machines."

Don't blame the American educational institution on you not remembering what was taught to you in 4th grade, and then again in 7 grade, and then yet again in High school. I guaranteee that at some point in your life, you were told about these things while in school.

In fact, just to make sure I'm not hallucinating, I just looked in my little sisters junior high history book. It's there.

Re:Not just American education... by kyknos.org · 2004-02-10 10:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

funny and interesting (and shocking to mee) is that we, in the eastern communist block, namely czech republic, were well informed not only about soviet space programme (and our own - we were, with soviet help, of course, the third country with man in the orbit), but also about american exploration.

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SHE does throw dice.

Also sample return. by AJWM · 2004-02-10 10:53 · Score: 2, Interesting

Sheesh, what (if anything) are they teaching kids these days?

The existence of the Lunokhods was certainly well-known at the time. Of course after the first couple of Apollo landings, the attention deficit disordered American public had pretty much lost interest even in humans walking on the Moon, so I guess it's no surprize that hardly anyone remembers the Lunokhods.

In that same time frame (between the two rover landings I think, but I could be wrong) the Russians also landed a vehicle that scooped up a sample of Lunar soil and returned it to Earth. A tiny fraction of what Apollo returned, of course, but significant in that it was from an area of the Moon that Apollo never visited.

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-- Alastair

Re:Russian schools just as bad! by gujo-odori · 2004-02-10 10:55 · Score: 5, Interesting

If you go to Viet Nam, you'll find a lot of people who believe that:

1) The Soviets landed people on the moon;

2) The US moon landings were faked.

They learned it in school. I've even heard that from some of my in-laws there, and I'm far from sure I've convinced them it isn't true. Heck, some Americans even believe 2.

Fast! by bobbis.u · 2004-02-10 10:55 · Score: 2, Interesting

How come the Lunokhod were so much faster than the Mars rovers? Lunokhod 2 was able to travel up to 2km/hr where as Spirit/Opportunity travel at 5cm/second max = 180m/hr (http://www.solarviews.com/eng/opportunity.htm).

I would have thought with advances in solar panels and motors that the new rovers would wipe the floor with the old Russian ones. I guess there are lots more instruments/computers to power and you need higher gain radio transmissions from Mars, but that is still a power of ten difference in speed.

Here is a nice picture too.

Re:11 months! by ackthpt · 2004-02-10 10:59 · Score: 5, Interesting

"Lunokhod 1 actually toured the lunar Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) for 11 months in one of the greatest successes of the Soviet lunar exploration program" I wonder how they managed to get them to hold up (and be potentially useful) for that long? sheer dumb luck?

I remember the whispering propaganda of the 60's and 70's. "The soviets all use crapy electronics", "The soviets rockets all crash or explode", "The soviets are way behind the USA", etc. In reality, time has revealed that whatever their politics, the soviets showed great economy and resourcefullness (at a time many US rockets blew up, too but were less publicized) and succeded in many ways. That their information has been so overlooked rather underscores a propaganda war on the part of the USA (and make no mistake, since the day Kennedy launched the Space Program, there was a huge propaganda onslaught to make US look good, inspite of setbacks and disasters.)

I've never met an astronaut, but have met a cosmonaut, an intelligent and personable fellow, who was mercilessly grilled by a college professor on politics rather than the space programs.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar

Ping! by NanoGator · 2004-02-10 10:59 · Score: 3, Interesting

What kind of ping times can you get to the moon? Just curious if these guys had to program the rover in a language kind of like logo, or if they just fired up the old Joystick?

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"Derp de derp."

An Ignorant American by Gothmolly · 2004-02-10 11:01 · Score: 1, Interesting

The mode of submission of this article earns it a -1, Flamebait. Why can't we have real journalism?

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I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.

information across the Iron Curtain by Maimun · 2004-02-10 11:02 · Score: 3, Interesting

Don't feel so bad about not having heard of Lunokhod. On the other side of the curtain there was a joke that the newspapers tested their absolutely smallest fonts when describing the American landing on the Moon.

So do the rest of us. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 11:04 · Score: 3, Interesting

goddamn, every day i am more and more amazed at how much us American's don't learn in school due to our government. For example, the Civil War. Think for a second what you learned (or retained) about it and the causes for it.

Now go read some real history and find out why it really happened.

The US government is far from honest and open and just.

Re:So do the rest of us. by flint · 2004-02-10 11:39 · Score: 5, Interesting

Go read who's real history?

Which author's/publisher's version do you accept as gospel? The one that says slavery? The one that says state's rights? They both have some truth in them.

I was taught in the public schools that Lincoln was trying to preserve the union. Abolishing slavery in the states in rebellion was a carefully considered wartime economic and political move that Jefferson Davis himself considered. Yes, it was hugely symbolic, but that doesn't mean it was *only* symbolic. The preservation of the union was the main thing as at that time in history England and France both had reasons for wanting us divided, weakened, and were really hoping for a divided union for obvious reasons.

I was also taught by my teachers that I would never learn everything in a few hours a day. That the teachers had enough time to cover only very monumental events and that it was the responsibility of ME AND MY PARENTS to make sure that I took the basic tools they gave us in school and go out in the world and read, question, and learn. And, to attempt to synthesize the various slanted historical perspectives before coming to my own conclusions.

Russian rovers! Bah! What monumental historical event should this displace in a curricula that can only cover a finite amount of material?

Stop blaming the system for everything they didn't teach you.

Thank a teacher that you've the wit to get in a flame war here on slashdot!

Re: A bit skewed? by SgtSnorkel · 2004-02-10 11:07 · Score: 2, Interesting

I was about 12 years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing. I knew all about the Lunokods. Reporting about them seemed to be downplayed some, most of the emphasis was on the manned stuff. But still they were reported in the news and followed by the interested public.

But then, my dad worked at the Marshall Space Flight center in Huntsville, then ran a NOAA tracking facility near Fairbanks. . . so maybe my perspective is a little bit skewed.

Ignorance isn't bliss. by Visceral+Monkey · 2004-02-10 11:11 · Score: 2, Interesting

"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."

Let's place the blame where it belongs, with yourself. This is hardly something that was hidden from the public, it's always been there for anyone who cared to look. Was it as well known as the current crop of NASA rovers? No, but there wasn't an internet, etc to splash the latest images around the world in moments either. It has nothing to do with your education, but rather your lack of curiosity up until this moment.

On the subject of Russian space feats, they were also the first country to mount a specially designed machine gun to a satellite and fire it in space. For peacefull purposes only, of course..

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*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*

Re:Ignorance isn't bliss. by kevcol · 2004-02-10 11:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

Let's place the blame where it belongs, with yourself.

Well said. I found about these rovers when I was in grade school from reading science encyclopedias in the library. I remember it being described as looking like a Victorian bathtub.

You can't learn about every space endeavour through school, you have to be curious enough to find out for yourself some things.

A related book... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 11:24 · Score: 1, Interesting

I've been told that the book What Ivan Knows that Johnny Doesn't was prompted by the space race but the year it was published suggests otherwise.

Why Lunokhod-2 died after 4 month by genka · 2004-02-10 11:24 · Score: 5, Interesting

The rovers were driven in real time, using a very low quality TV- no half-tones, one frame in several seconds. One day they drove Lunokhod-2 into a crater, and had troubles climbing out. The drivers decided to back off a little. Lunokhod-2 had no rear- view camera, and they collided with a rim of the crater. The solar battery was covered in dust, reducing it's output. They try to clean the battery by flipping it, but the dust wouldn't come out, and what would got on a heat radiator surface, which lead to overheating. The drivers got the rover out of the crater, but it didn't wake up after next lunar night. Source (in Russian): http://www.space.hobby.ru/projects/lunochod1.html

Richard Garriott bought one of them by MauMan · 2004-02-10 11:32 · Score: 3, Interesting

It might be of interest to some of you that Richard "Lord British" Garriott of Ultima fame actually bought one of the rovers from the Russians in the 90s.

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Re:11 months! by Axe · 2004-02-10 11:36 · Score: 4, Interesting

To be fair, the Soviets accomplished large engineering projects because they just didn't give a fuck about quality control, economics, or long-term consequences.

Funny. I now work for an american corporation, and did work closely with NASA. And we indeed give a fuck about quaity control, economics, or long-term consequences. A very long, hard fuck.

But statistics is a stubbron thing. Russian space craft, from boosters to landers do have higher success rate. Go figure.

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<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>

Re:11 months! by KarMann · 2004-02-10 12:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

Yeah, the same dumb luck that had them dropping what are still the only robotic probes to return data from the Venusian surface, starting back in 1970. Can't you give them credit for anything? I remember way back when, around the time the Venera probes were still being sent out, one of the main then-current contrasts between "us and them" was their skill with the probes, while we got people to the Moon.

And, just so the rest of the world doesn't get the idea we're too wrapped up in ourselves, or Americans start to get the idea I'm one of "them", this American remembers learning about Lunokhod around 25 years ago, when I would have been somewhere between the ages of 5 and 10. Don't ask me what the ignorami did with their youths.

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ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.

[Topic drift] Propaganda was on both sides by orzetto · 2004-02-10 12:27 · Score: 2, Interesting

The more people I meet from East Europe, the more I am convinced that the two worlds were much more similar than what we westerners were raised to believe.
People from former East Germany don't shun their origins as people from Nazi Germany would have (see 79qm DDR, which I am told is a quite precise account of the facts by East Germans). Some are even fond of the old eastern flag. A Czech girl told me that, visiting San Francisco, she was appalled by seeing American girls executing a Spartakiad. They were cheerleaders.

There were abuses of human rights on both fields, sometimes specular in type if not in magnitude; McCarthy in the US, stalinist purges in the USSR (Ok, McCarthy never got to that magnitude); invasion of Czechoslovakia and Hungary there, coups in Greece and Chile here; Vietnam for the US and Afghanistan for the USSR (Ok, the USSR was fighting the good fight and the US not, but their methods did not differ much, and civilians suffered most in both cases).

On the other hand, things went on pretty normally for average people on both sides. It was dangerous being against communism in the USSR as much as it was being a communist in the US, and the likelihood of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to lose their elections was pretty much the same as the American Communist Party's to win them.

This is not to say "everybody's a human-right criminal, blast human rights, they were all good fellas".
It is to say that, instead of laughing at propaganda crap in other countries, you should think what propaganda they fed you as truth; that is the most dangerous, as nobody is out there telling you how ludicrous lies you are being exposed to. For instance some may be interested in what was going on in 1984.

One thing is watching Goebbels on the Discovery Channel with a Brit telling you what a jerk he was, another one is being a German, who had been on the brink of starvation before nazism, that has no other information channels than the nazi state's, that stands in a cheering crowd, and who, when Joseph asks, "Wolles Sie den totalen Krieg?", cannot help shouting "Ja!".

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Beeing in the middle by cavac · 2004-02-10 13:42 · Score: 3, Interesting

"Thanks to my American science education, I had never heard of this feat."

Well, i'm glad to be from Europe (Austria to be exact), because we were - as a neutral country - beeing subject to both western AND eastern brainwashing and so got information of both sides of the space race :-)

Well, to get the truth to it: Science experiments of Austria have flown on both sides; we even got an astronaut (or Austronaut) to MIR, which is quite a feat for such a small country...

BTW, look at quite a nice Lunokhod picture and also see the US Ranger Program to get a better view of the real pressures in NASA's side of the space race.

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Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev

Re:I'd like the poster to quit his whining. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 14:10 · Score: 3, Interesting

I'd like the next poster to quit comparing his relatively privileged education to that received by the average American.

My schools didn't give me the tools I needed to find things out. Luckily, I dropped out and started reading, which was a great boon once I got into college.

All I was taught about Russia in school was that their government was put in place without concern for the will of the people, their government spied on its own people, corruption was rampant, and a bunch of fat cats at the top lived well off of the sweat of the commoners. Actually, learning those things *has* helped me deal with modern-day America.

Quit being so "born on third base, thought he hit a triple". Start paying more attention to the perks you got growing up, that weren't shared by the majority of your fellow Americans, let alone the rest of the world.

Interesting tid-bit by Pig+Hogger · 2004-02-10 16:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

(Of course, European newspapers and rags were plastered end-to-end with Lunokhod articles when it happenned)

Here is an interesting tid-bit: to remotely drive the rovers, the russians selected people who did not have driver licences.

The idea was that they would not have driver's reflexes they would have to unlearn in order to drive a vehicle with a 1 second lag in response thanks to the Earth_Moon gap...

Re:Not just a Google web search by igny · 2004-02-10 17:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

Also look at some Mongolian stamps

Launch of Probe Lunik 2

Apollo 11

Lunokhod 1 and Apollo14

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In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra

TransOrbital to Image the Lunokhod Landing Sites by wthompson · 2004-02-11 03:24 · Score: 2, Interesting

TransOrbital, Inc. has plans to image the landing sites of both the Apollo and Lunokhod programs during their TrailBlazer mission. A description of the mission is available here. There is also some info on the Lunokhod rovers available here.

Re:What's the point? by Buran · 2004-02-11 04:19 · Score: 3, Interesting

It's pretty amazing how much stuff they did land on the Moon. The first crash-lander was Soviet. The first soft-lander was Soviet. The first fly-by was by a Soviet probe. The first rover was Soviet. Etc. For whatever reason, those efforts are, as you say, little known among the general public even though the information sent back was vital toward sending humans there (Example: Luna 9 didn't sink into the swamp, so it was pretty safe to guess that it wasn't all that likely that the US Surveyor craft wouldn't, either, and they didn't.)

I once posted in a discussion on fark.com about a different space mission, made a comment in passing about the fact that there were US and Soviet craft on the moon, and somebody informed me, with disdain, that all the flags on the Moon were American.

Nope. Not by a long shot, they weren't. Even the tiny Luna 9 carried some Soviet memorabilia.

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i am a soviet space shuttle

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