Luna 11 was an unmanned space mission of the Soviet Union's Luna program. It is also called Lunik 11. Luna 11 was launched towards the Moon from an earth-orbiting platform and entered lunar orbit on August 28, 1966. The objectives of the mission included the study of:
lunar gamma- and X-ray emissions in order to determine the Moon's chemical composition;
lunar gravitational anomalies;
the concentration of meteorite streams near the Moon; and,
the intensity of hard corpuscular radiation near the Moon.
A total of 137 radio transmissions and 277 orbits of the Moon were completed before the batteries failed on October 1, 1966.
This subset of the “second-generation” Luna spacecraft, the Ye-6LF, was designed to take the first photographs of the surface of the Moon from lunar orbit. A secondary objective was to obtain data on mass concentrations (“mascons”) on the Moon first detected by Luna 10. Using the basic Ye-6 bus, a suite of scientific instruments (plus an imaging system similar to the one used on Zond 3) replaced the small lander capsule used on the soft-landing flights. The resolution of the photos was reportedly 15 to 20 meters. A technological experiment included testing the efficiency of gear transmission in vacuum as a test for a future lunar rover. Luna 11, launched only two weeks after the U.S. Lunar Orbiter, successfully entered lunar orbit at 21:49 UT on 27 August. Parameters were 160 x 1,193 kilometers. During the mission, the TV camera failed to return usable images because the spacecraft lost proper orientation to face the lunar surface when a foreign object was lodged in the nozzle of one of the attitude-control thrusters. The other instruments functioned without fault before the mission formally ended on 1 October 1966 after the power supply had been depleted.
This article contains material and/or images that originally came from a NASA website. All NASA information is in the public domain, with the exception of the usage-restricted NASA logo. For more information, please review NASA's use guidelines (http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/policies.html#Guidelines).
Lunas were the first manmade objects to attain of escape velocity; to impact on the moon; to photograph the far side of the moon; to soft land on the moon; to retrieve and return lunar surface samples to the earth; and to deploy a lunar rover on the moon's surface.
Luna 12 was launched towards the Moon from an earth-orbiting platform and achieved a lunar orbit of of 100 km x 1740 km on October 25, 1966.
Luna 16 was launched toward the Moon from a preliminary earth orbit and entered a lunar orbit on September 17, 1970.
The Luna 13 spacecraft was launched toward the moon from an Earth-orbiting platform and accomplished a soft landing on December 24, 1966, in the region of Oceanus Procellarum.
The spacecraft instrumentation was similar to that of Luna 10 and provided data for studies of the interaction of the Earth and lunar masses, the lunar gravitational field, the propagation and stability of radio communications to the spacecraft at different orbital positions, solar charged particles and cosmic rays, and the motion of the Moon.
Luna 16 was the first robotic probe to land on the moon and return a sample to Earth and represented the first lunar sample return mission by the Soviet Union and the third overall, following the Apollo11 and 12 missions.
Feeds |
Contact