Luna 9, a Soviet spacecraft, achieved history's first successful lunar touchdowns, delivering image panoramas showing fine surface details. Lunar soil from the lunar Highland (mass of 55 gs) was delivered to the Earth.įIGURE 7. The returned apparatus landed 40 kms from Dzhezkazgan (Kazahstan). The spacecraft approached Earth on February 25. The mass of the return rocket was 512 kg. Once completed the program, the station with a capsule with soil started from the lunar surface on February 23. All operations were carried out by commands from the Earth. This operation was monitored using telephotometers. After drilling, the drill was drawn into the drilling rig and, using a lever, was placed into a return capsule and closed with a sealed lid. Drilling was carried out in several stages with intermediate stops. The drill rig at critical moments by an additional mechanical drive was raised and lowered again. The drill easily overcame the first centimeters of soil, and then the resistance grew. A lever lowered the drill rig to the lunar surface. The soil-sampling device was the same as on the Luna-16. Using two telephotometers, the station transmitted images to the Earth to select a location for drilling ( Surkov, 1972). Unlike the Luna-16, which landed on a lunar night, the Luna-20 landed on a lunar day. The landing speed in Highlands was reduced with respect to previous Luna spacecrafts, resulting in the softest landing. On February 21, the station descended to the lunar surface 130 km north of Luna-16 landing site on Highland between the Mare Fecunditatis and the Mare Crisium, and a few kilometers west from the Apollonius Crater (landing site coordinates - 3✣2΄ N, 56✣3΄ E) ( Barsukov and Surkov, 1979). The following Luna-20 spacecraft was launched on February 14, 1972. Information about the transportation boxes used, the vehicles and methods used to transfer the samples are not represented in the literature.Įvgeny Slyuta, in Sample Return Missions, 2021 3.6.2 Luna-20 A small portion of returned samples was shared with NASA in December 1976 ( Slyuta et al., 2020). It landed on Soviet Union ( Badescu, 2012). The probe sampled Mare Crisum and on the 22nd of August 1976 returned with 170.1 gs of lunar soil. Luna 24 was launched more than 4 years after Luna 20 on the 14th of August 1976. Sampled material was anorthosite from ancient lunar highlands rather than basalt returned from Luna 16 ( Slyuta et al., 2020). When opened, the return capsule proved to contain only 55 gs of lunar soil ( Wesley and Mikhail, 2011). The delay was due to ice, wind and snow which raised severe difficulties for the recovery phase. In particular, the Earth-return vehicle landed in Kazakhstan and was recovered from the mission team about 24 h later. Luna 20 was launched on the 14th of February 1972, carried back about 55 gs of collected lunar samples from lunar highlands and landed in the Soviet Union on the 25th of February 1972 ( Wesley and Mikhail, 2011). The Luna 16 re-entry capsule landed on approximately 80 km SE of the city of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan at 03:26 UT The samples were placed in a hermetically sealed soil sample container inside a re-entry capsule. It came back with 101 gs of collected material of lunar soil.Įach spacecraft was equipped with an extendable arm with a drilling rig for the collection of a lunar soil sample. Luna 16 was the first robotic probe to sample the Moon as well as the third SRM (after Apollo 11 and 12). Luna 16, Luna 20 and Luna 24 (1970, 1972, 1976) were three successful soviet SRMs flown as a part of Luna program as a competitor of Apollo Missions. Russell, in Sample Return Missions, 2021 15.3.2 Luna Program (USSR, 1959–1976)
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