And with that I think we will close our examination of Lunokhod 2, a remarkable mission in many ways. This was only the second time any vehicle had been driven remotely on another world (the first being Lunokhod 1), and I would rank them and the sample return missions as the greatest achievements of the Soviet Union in lunar exploration, on a par with their Venus results and far beyond what they accomplished at Mars.
Tomorrow... another orbiter.
#moon #luna21 #lunokhod2
Early in our Lunokhod 2 sequence i gave a link to the Lunokhod 2 panoramas. Here is one of them:
https://www.planetology.ru/panoramas/images/big/lunokhod2_c/L2_D03_S05_P14m.jpg
Day 3, session 5, pan 14... it was taken at the south end of the triple traverse on 13 or 14 March 1973. One of my closeup maps shows that location with visible tracks around a crater. The crater is visible in this image. Across the crater are the day 2 tracks made on 19 February. My image here is a reprojection to show the tracks better. #moon #luna21 #lunokhod2
Their conclusion: the lunar daytime sky is too bright for useful astronomy. Night would be OK. This is attributed to dust lofted electrostatically or by impacts, and scattering sunlight.
This might seem counterintuitive. Surveyor and Apollo observations show some apparent effects of dust but the LADEE orbiter did not find much. Maybe the new Firefly images will help. Was there contamination of the Lunokhod instrument? We don't know.
#moon #luna21 #lunokhod2
While we are talking about puzzles, here's another. At points marked 'S' on the maps a measurement of sky brightness was reported. Here's the citation:
Severny, A. B et al., 1975. The measurements of sky brightness on Lunokhod-2. The Moon v. 14, pp. 123-128.
They measured in visible and UV, both day and night. The UV sky was a bit brighter than expected, but the visible light sky was 'off-scale' bright and still quite bright after sunset...
And 2 more maps like this. Here we see the third night location and the place where the rover arrived at the edge of Straight Rille, the long north-south trough.
We will have two more maps like these tomorrow.
And that would not be so bad except that they had to promote it as 'our prof found a rover that had been lost for decades'. Suddenly this was picked up by other media and everyone knew about it. Obviously, VERY quickly, the correct story emerged and I had to deal with it. The next time I saw Sasha Basilevsky I apologised profusely, but he was very polite and forgiving about it. Memo to self - don't be stupid.
Tomorrow: back to reality.
Phil Stooke