Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

Luna 12 images
lunar orbiters and doing less than justice to the 15 m resolution of the cameras [11].
There are some reports that the photographs were so poor that the Russians ended up
resorting to assembling the publicly available American Ranger and Lunar Orbiter
archive to plan their moon landings; but this could be a traditional Western underestimate
of Soviet photographic capabilities. There is no suggestion that anything
went wrong, so the pictures must have been at least up to the standards of Zond 3.
Because they were taken at much closer range, they were probably much better. Either
way, it is more than likely that there are still some Luna 12 pictures deep in some
Moscow archive. In addition to cameras, Luna 12 carried a gamma ray spectrometer,
magnetometer, infrared radiometer and micrometeorite detector. Assessments were
made of the reflectivity of the lunar surface to infer its density (1,400 kg/m 3 ).
Presumably, the Luna 12 pictures would have been decisive in determining where
the Russians would land on the moon. The American lunar orbiters enabled the
Americans to narrow down the choice of the first landing to five prospective sites, all
near the equator (likewise, Luna 12 flew over the equatorial belt, between 15°N and
15°S, in a much narrower band than Luna 11, which operated between 27°N and
27°S). A team in the Vernadsky Institute, led by Alexander Bazilsvsky (b. 1937),
worked on site selection for the manned landing from 1968 and also for soil sample
and rover missions. Eventually, the Russians selected three smooth areas for the first
manned landing on the moon:
• Ocean of Storms;
• Sinus Meridiani; and
• Sea of Tranquility (not the Apollo 11 site).