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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.)"
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).
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.
"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 wonder what else american public schools forgot to teach me...
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.
That's because in Soviet Russia, moon rovers learn about YOU!
Sorry...couldn't resist.
Also look at the pictures (images.google.com)
candidly
They were pretty successful. The last pictures showed something like this on the lunar surface. After this, transmissions were cut off.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I remember reading about these rovers when I was in GRADE school. Or am I carbon dating myself?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
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. :/
I knew someone from Russia that swore that the russians had landed a man on the moon before the USA. She didnt belive me that they never got anyone on the moon...
I can't believe that the Russians beat us there. To think that they could have been the first to build a movie set and fake a lunar rover landing! I'm glad we were first to think of putting human actors on the set, though!
Not A Sig
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.
"the most interesting thing about all of this is that they remodeled the rover for earthside use under the brand name lada.
Tested on the moon? This must explain the "bounce 20 feet in the air when you roll over a pebble" suspension.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
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.
In America we tend to forget that we are far from immune from 'evil socializing school.' I remember hearing about flying Russian dogs but never moon rovers. In fact, come to think of it I never knew we landed on the moon more than once until I saw Apollo 13.
It reminds us that our history books stilled talked about manifest destiny in grand terms until the mid 70s and how the genocide of indigenous peoples in our own country was conveniently brushed aside at the same time. Politicians here love to criticize Japanese teachings about WWII, but this is a good reminder that us Americans should temper our supposed superiority from time to time.
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.
--Chag
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.
It really is true. I'm in the Western Hemisphere right now, and it is light out. It so happens that many of the features in the northern part of the dark side of the Earth at this time also have Russian names. Imagine that!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
SHE does throw dice.
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..."
"Thanks to my American science education, I had never heard of this feat."
Don't be sad. Thanks to my soviet-era communist education, I was convinced in my school years that the Apollo maned missions to Moon are just an expenisve imperialist publicity stunt with no real scientific value.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
I went to American public schools.
I knew that Russians had put rovers on the moon.
School's job is not to tell you everything that's ever happened. School's job is to give you the tools you need to find things out. I got those tools. You did not. The fact that we both got an "American" education is irrelevant.
Quit blaming your ignorance on your teachers. Start paying more attention to what they had to work with.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I actually knew about them. Supposedly the first one (or the first attempt) was landed on the moon the same day as Neil and Buzz. Too bad a rover is nothing compared to men.
What is your penile percentile?
When the Soviet Union wad ruled by Leonid Brezhnev, an extremely elderly person not capable of any mental activity furing his late years, there was a joke about Lunokhod and Brezhnev.
Airport in Germany. Soviet and German leaders meet. As the Germans come to the Soviet airplane, Brezhnev comes out, sniffs everyone from the German delegation, picks up some dirt off the ground, puts it in his pocket and returns to the airplane.
Few minutes later a Russian scientist apologizes: "We messed up and instead of Presidential visit program loaded up Lunokhod program".
And if you are in Kansas, you can see them st the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
-- Alastair
An imaginary quote from some Astronaut landing on the moon and tripping over one of these, not knowing about them.
His ass would be on monolith alert after that, no doubt!
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.
From looking at the Wikipedia history, it appears that the GNAA poster is at 82-32-36-56.cable.ubr05.azte.blueyonder.co.uk (82.32.36.56). This is a Blueyonder cable subscriber in the UK. I am currently hacking their computer.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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?
"Derp de derp."
yep, you guessed it...
I, for one, welcome our new Russian Roverlords.
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.
I did learn about these in school, but then I was always interested in space.
Try these questions.
What was the name of the first American lander on the moon?
The name of the first lander on Mars?
What was then name of the first US communications sattilite?
Most people know little about space.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
If you had asked me, cold, if the russians had operated a rover on the moon, I probably would have said no. But, looking at that picture, I remember it vividly. As a kid, I was given a coffee table book called "The History of Flight" or some such (I think I still have the book). I remember thinking the picture of the Blackbird was just too cool and the "bathtub" probe too comical to actually be real.
While I might not have the educational system of the USA (in a general sense) in the greatest regard (relax, I don't hold my own in high regard) this apparent lack of knowledge is rather general. I remember Lunokhod very well but I was a) very interest in spacial exploration when I was a kid and b) most of the books I had were from the USSR (or from Novosti Press editions in Portugal).
The thing is, most of my classmates were not even interest in the whole subject, so for them Lunokhod or Appolo didn't meant anything. In the USA it's obvious that people have knowledge (or should have, it is after all a great thing to be prouf of) about their own space missions, but beyond that it's really down to curiosity and personal interest.
I would argue that most knowledge of this kind that people have is not directly derived from taking classes at school but it's a result of curiosity and self-reading. And perhaps rightly so.
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.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Believe me, if all you have to offer is what was fed to you at school, you've got a long way to go.
How about how to teach yourself?
Try reading, it works great. You can find these things called books at a place called a library.
In addition to teaching me how to use a library, my parents also bought a big pile of paper called an encyclopedia. The purchase includes yearly updates called yearbooks.
Then there's a yellow skinned magazine to which your parents or grandparents should have subscribed. It is called National Geographic. Issues go way back. Even though it is renowned mainly for its photography and printing quality, you should try reading it.
Be sure to subscribe before you have kids of your own.
Happy education!
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
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..
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/9901/lunokh od_t.jpg
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990109.html
Worst
Not only did I know about the Russian rovers, I had a set of Russian stamps with Soyuz and the rovers on them.
Thanks to *my* American education.
If you really lament your education, I think you should speak to your parents about their lack of involvement, and to yourself about your lack of curiosity.
Clear, Dark Skies
as a 'weapon of mass destruction' against the Native American population? Did they teach you about that?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
that Mars and the Moon aren't the same place?
Clear, Dark Skies
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
The Russians beat the US a very large number of firsts in space. First satellite, first animals in space, first human in space, first safe landings from orbit, first spacewalk, first to the land a probe on Mars, first probe to Venus, first orbital station, first flight around the moon.
The whole notion that the US "won the space race" is an interesting bit of spin. The fact is that the USSR notched up a very large number of firsts and could equally argue that they won the race if the finishing line hadn't been arbitraly decided to be a manned mission to the moon (and you can bet that it wasn't the Russians who decided that that was the only feat which mattered).
The US won the cold war over the USSR, or more to the point, outlasted the USSR, because the USSR ran out of money. Ultimately the Soviet system was a poor means of running a country, so they lost their super power status... but that hardly means they lost the space race.
As Napolean said: history is a lie made up by the victors.
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.
------- Code to try when you're bored: qsort( 0, UINT_MAX, sizeof( int* ), IntCompare );
"...so rather than risking dnagerous human mission on the moon, they only sent robot, while astronauts stayed safely at home."
What's the point of exploring space if we don't go there? The Europeans (and unlucky Africans) that settled North and South America didn't send something to report back saying, "Oh, that's nice", they went there. The U.S., Canada, Mexico, and all of Central and South America as they are now is the result. Yes, negative ramifications abounded, but the collective we wouldn't be where we are today if it weren't for those circumstances. Humanity is stronger because we are spread out, and if we actually get the guts to try to go into space permanently we will be stronger still. I'd like to hope that all of the work we do isn't for nothing in the long haul. We're the most versatile living thing to come about in known history. Let's see what we can really do.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The Wikipedia page has been slashdotted.
Under a list of protected pages, the Lunokhod program page is listed because page was listed on a /. story 26 minutes ago, has already been vandalized half a dozen times including insertion of goatsex links. Pakaran. 23:06, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)
The metric system is the tool of the devil. My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and thats the way I likes it!
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
OK, your vaunted Google search gives 29 results for 'Lunokhod + "11 days"'. Did you bother to find out how many it got for 'Lunokhod + "11 months"'? 39 hits. Duh.
And aside from that, if you follow the links, you'll see that it landed on November 17, 1970, and "operations... officially ceased" on October 4, 1971. It also happens to mention "Lunokhod was intended to operate through three lunar days but actually operated for eleven lunar days."
ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.
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.
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!".
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
After Americans put men on the Moon, Brezhnev calls for the cosmonauts and tells them: ;-)
- In order to win the space race, you will land on the Sun!
- But we'll burn there, Leonid Il'ich!
- Don't worry, the Communist Party's Central Commettee is not stupid! You'll fly there in the night!
P.S. Anyone can translate the anecdote about Challenger and "zalpy saljuta"?
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
"Pomirat', tak s muzykoj" - the literal translation will be "If it is to die, then do it with a music".
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Everybody knows those pictures were just of a sound stage in Siberia.
paintball
"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.
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
This just in! Children are not being taugh all of the knowledge contained in the universe in school! When pressed for comment, the school said "Time is finite". We'll be sure to get more info on this conspiracy in the next hour, stay tuned!
Deriding the American educational system for not having kids memorize every event in space history is a bit harsh. To be fair there is quite a bit of space history, and this feat while impressive was clearly not as impressive as walking on the moon, and came second. I also doubt there is some dark sinister nationalism at fault, as also seems to be hinted at.
Lets deride the American education system for failing to teach reading and math, not obscure space trivia.
Letter To Iran
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....
Jan 28, 1986, date of Challenger's launch.
The President of the United States gets a call from Russia's Prime Minister, Mikhail Gorbachev:
- Hello, President?
- Yes?
- Please accept our sincere apologies for Challenger's explosion!
- But it's scheduled to launch in 40 seconds!
- Oh? Ok, we'll call back!
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...
unlike the moon, mars is so far away that driving the rover in real-time isn't very feasible (you tell it to move, then 30-40 minutes later you'll get your image back showing the result).
So the latest mars rovers are semi-autonomous. Mission control gives them a destination, and the rover finds its own way there.
Now the reason for the slow speed has a bit to do with control theory. One of the most accurate ones we've developed to date works like this: Plot a path to the destination using currently available data (from your cameras, range finders etc). Take the first step on that path. Halt. Look at your data, plot a new path to the ultimate destination. Take step. Halt. And so on.
This system allows the rovers to navigate on their own pretty well and deal with obstacles as they come across them (which may not have been obvious in the first path plot).
Humans do essentially the same thing as we navigate in our world except we call it "reflexes".
The slowness with the rovers has to do with their low power consumption limiting both motor power and processing power and just plain ole' caution. Mars has alot less sun than the moon does so solar panels aren't as efficient. And when you've got an $800 million pair of machines... you want them to take their time to get to their destinations. Especially since getting results takes so long anyway.
-
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.