Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

Landing cabin
Height 112 cm
Base
58 cm
with petals
160 cm
with arms
3m
Weight
82kg
Ye-6 instruments
• Ye-6M (Luna 13).
• Camera.
• Radiometer.
• Dynamograph/penetrometer ('gruntmeter').
• Thermometer.
• Cosmic ray detector.
The lander was egg-shaped, pressurized, metallic-looking and made of aluminium.
Inside were a thermal regulation system, chemical batteries designed to last four days,
transmitters and scientific equipment. Once stable on the surface, four protective
petals would open on the top to release the four 75 cm transmitting aerials. The most
important element was of course the camera. Although often described as a television
camera, it was more accurately called a pinpoint photometer and took the form of a
cylinder with a space for the scanning mirror to look out the side. These are optical
mechanical cameras and do not use film in the normal sense, instead scanning for light
levels, returning the different levels by signal to Earth in a video, analogue or digital
manner. The system was designed by I.A. Rosselevich, built by Leningrad's Scientific
Research Institute NII-380 and was based on systems originally used on high-altitude
rockets. The camera was small, only 3.6 kg in weight and used a system of mirrors to
scan the lunar surface vertically and horizontally over the period of an hour working
on only 15 watts of electricity. The lander would transmit for a total of five hours over
the succeeding four days, either on pre-programmed command or on radioed instructions
from the ground.
A safe landing required as vertical a descent as possible. From the photography
point of view, the Russians wanted to land a spacecraft during local early dawn. The
lunar shadows would therefore be as long as possible, providing maximum contrast
and enabling scale to be calculated. Once again, Keldysh's Mathematics Institute
calculated the trajectories. Earth-moon mechanics and lighting conditions were such
that a direct early dawn descent could come down in only one part of the moon, the
Ocean of Storms. This is the largest sea on the moon, covering much of its western
hemisphere.
The Americans built a comparable spacecraft, Ranger. Here, the Americans
intended to achieve the double objective of photographing the lunar surface and
achieve a soft-landing. On Ranger, the main spacecraft was a hexagonal frame which
contained the equipment, engine and cameras. As Ranger came down toward the