Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

To guide the route chosen, Lunokhod had four 1.3 kg panoramic cameras similar
to those on Luna 16 to scan 360° around the rover and two television cameras to scan
forward, with a 50 ° field of view and 1/25 sec speed. The scan of the panoramic
cameras was designed in such a way as to cover the horizon right around to parts of
the rover and its wheel base. They provided high-resolution images, 6,000 x 500
pixels. Signals were sent back by both an omnidirectional and narrow-beam antenna.
The driving camera relayed pictures back to Earth every 20 sec and these enabled a
five-person ground crew to drive the Lunokhod: commander, driver, navigator,
engineer and radio operator. The rover could go forwards or backwards. Gyroscopes
would stop the rover if it appeared to tilt too much forward or backward or to one
side.
The selection of the ground crew was an important part of the programme. Two
five-man crews were selected from the Missile Defence Corps in 1968 [4]. Volunteers
were sent for tests for speed-of-reaction times, short and long-term memory, vision,
hearing and capacity for prolonged mental focus and attention. At one stage of their
recruitment, they thought they were being trained as cosmonauts. They were under
strict instructions not to talk about their work to outsiders. Years later, their names
became known. They had been recruited by the Strategic Rocket Forces in the late
1960s when the call had gone out for 'top class military engineers. Young but
experienced. Sporting and in a good state of health.' Twenty-five were chosen and
sent to Moscow for a special mission, they did not know what. They were put through
a series of tests in the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems, where the group
was reduced by eight. Then, the seventeen remaining were told that they would be
driving machines across the surface of the moon, whereupon three resigned, saying
that the responsibility and stress would be too much for them. The fourteen remaining
were divided: half were sent off to Leningrad to the VNII-100 design bureau where the
Lunokhod was built and the other half were assigned to work on the design with the
Lavochkin design bureau. In 1968, construction began of a 'lunardrome' in Simferopol
in the Crimea, and the driving teams spent the rest of the year there learning how
to drive a Lunokhod model.
Commander
Driver
Navigator
Engineer
Radio, antenna
Table 7.1. The Lunokhod operators
First crew Second crew
Nikolai Yeremenko
Gabdulkay Latypov
Konstantin Davidovsky
Leonid Mosenzov
Valeri Sapranov
Reserve Vasili Chubukin
Igor Fyodorov
Vyacheslav Dovgan
Vikentiy Samal
Albert Kozhevnikov
Nikolai Kozlitin