A little bit of learning while you guys are out of school for the summer.
During the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a feverish competition to be the first to set foot on the moon. We know who won this race, but less about a secret chapter. The Soviets many not have sent a man to the moon, but they successfully guided two small robots by remote control from the earth.
The first actual remote operated interplanetary robot was built by the USSR in 1970 and was called the Lunakhod 1. The robot was flown on the Luna 17 moon mission and landed in the Mare Imbrium, a large area in the moon’s northern hemisphere. It was driven by remote control and was designed to collect soil samples and analyze density and composition of the samples.
The Lunakhod 1 weighed 838 kilograms and was 1.5x1.5 meters long. It had 8 wheels and could travel 1-2 kilometers/hour. It had two antennas, four television cameras, an x-ray spectrometer, an x-ray telescope, cosmic-ray detectors, and a laser device. It was powered by a solar cell array mounted inside the “lid,” and it had a radioactive heat source to retain heat during the lunar night. It operated for 4 months and traveled approximately 35 kilometers, took more than 20,000 TV pictures, 200 TV panoramas, and more than 500 soil tests.
Several years after the Lunakhod 1, on January 8, 1973, the Soviets sent up the Lunakhod 2, also known as the Luna 21 mission. The Lunakhod 2 was very similar to its predecessor, Lunakhod 1. It stood about 1.5 meters high and weighed 840 kilograms. Its sensors included a soil mechanics tester, x-ray equipment, an astrophotometer to measure light, a magnetometer, a radiometer and a laser corner-reflector supplied by the French. The Lunakhod was controlled by a 5-man team on earth, which sent it commands in real-time. While on the moon, it took 80,000 TV pictures, 86 panoramic images, and traveled 37 kilometers.
The Lunakod was the brain child of Alexander Kemurdjian the chief designer of the first automated moon rover.
Kemurdjian was not only responsible for the first (and still only) automated Moon rovers, but also help create the first Mars rover as well. He led a team that introduced the virtues of a Mars rover to the world in the Society’s international testing program in the late 1980s. His work has had extraordinary influence on robotic designs in the USA and Europe as well as in Russia.