Lunokhod-1 Soviet Lunar Surface Vehicle

Published by The Rand Corporation-iii-PREFACE This report has been prepared within the scope of the Soviet literature exploitation program to provide a somewhat more complete description of the nature and capabilities of the Soviet moon rover than that generally available in any one of the published sources. For this reason the entire series of newspaper accounts published since the moon landing has been scanned to obtain a more-or-less consistent picture. Because of the large input of data and to save time, the usual procedure of referencing each publication has been omitted.SUMMARY The following account of the Soviet lunar-exploration vehicle, Lunokhod-1, delivered to the lunar surface in the Sea of Rains on November 17, 1970 by the Luna-17 mission, has been assembled from a very large volume of literature published in the USSR between that date and May 1971. This descriptive treatment has been prepared to aid in the evaluation of Lunokhod-1 as a new tool of unmanned extraterrestrial exploration, as a scientific instrument, and above all, as a specimen of special-purpose Soviet cybernetics and equipment. The mere fact that the vehicle has so far traveled nearly 10 km over rugged terrain and apparently continues to do so indicates success of the concept of a remote drone interacting directly with an unknown and hostile environment. Its progress has been slow but steady; it comes alive during lunar days and it is shut down for the nights, giving its operators a considerable wealth of experience with the concept of dormancy. Another novel area where experience is being accumulated steadily is man-machine interaction with prolonged time delay. It is this concept that seems to fascinate the Soviets the most and that has produced the most detailed technical information. As a scientific laboratory the vehicle represents a fairly modest capability. Its sensory equipment comprises narrow-band television systems, mechanical probes, a chemical analysis system, X-ray and cosmic-ray detectors, and assorted temperature and pressure gauges. However, the telemetry associated with the transmission of their data to the earth must be quite formidable. According to Soviet publications the data-flow on the condition of the vehicle's wheels alone exceeds all the information received from all the artificial satellites during the first three years of the space era. The significant point to consider is that, however limited are the experimental resources of the vehicle, they are being applied systematically if slowly to an ever-widening area of the moon, an …