Luna 24 Essay

628 Words3 Pages

Lola Patty
Josue’s Earth Science 900

Luna 24 Luna-24 launched as the final Soviet mission to the moon in 1976. The spacecraft was placed in category E-8-5m within the Soviet Rocket Industry. The estimated cost of the Luna programme was about $4.5 billion.The mission’s goal was to collect samples of lunar soil. Official Soviet sources disclosed Luna-24’s re-designed drilling mechanism, a tool not necessarily used on soil-sample missions.
E-8-5m’s number 413 spacecraft launched from Balkonur’s Site 81 on August 9, 1976 at 18:04, Moscow time. This was the third mission made with E-8-m lunar-sampling crafts, the previous two ending in failures.the KIP-10 ground station in Simpheropol served as the main control center responsible for the flight.
By August 16th and 17th, Luna-24 was 12 kilometers above the lunar surface during it’s final orbits of the moon. On the 18th, the craft’s engine was fired one more time to initiate its descent towards the surface, and 6 minutes later was resting on the moon. Immediately after the landing, the KIP-10 ground station started up the drilling mechanism. This was a revised type of rotary percussion-drill, LB-9.
LB-9 was developed by the Tashkent branch of the KBOM design bureau, as an assignment from NPO Lavochkin. The new device was able to preserve the original position …show more content…

This was more than three times the amount delivered by the previous Soviet sample-return mission, Luna 20. The samples were studied and stored at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, or GEOKhI, of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Otherwise they were shared throughout the Geological institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, as well as 0.91 grams to the British scientists, and even NASA scientist Dr. Michael Duke exchanged 3 grams of Luna-24’s samples for 0.5 grams of samples delivered by Apollo astronauts. The samples were studied across various US academic

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