Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

13-14, Vega 1-2). Venera 13 and 14 drilled Venusian soil and analyzed it in an
onboard laboratory. Balloons were dropped into the Venusian atmosphere (part
of the Vega project). Orbiters first circled the planet in 1975 (Venera 9, 10) and then
in 1983 radar-mapped its surface (Venera 15-16). By the end of the Vega programme
in 1986, Venus's surface, atmosphere and circumplanetary space had been well
characterized.
Mars took second place in the Soviet programme for interplanetary exploration.
The Russian Mars 3 probe became the first spacecraft to soft-land on the Red Planet
and sent a picture from its surface in December 1971. The Soviet Union obtained a full
profile of the atmosphere right down to the surface during the descent of Mars 6 into
the Mare Erythraeum in March 1974. After a gap of many years, the USSR went on to
organize an imaginative mission to Mars's little moon, Phobos, in 1988-9 (the first
probe failed, the second achieved limited success). The Americans began a wave of
missions to Mars in the 1990s, each one revealing more and more of what an
interesting planet it was.
In the light of the genuine progress made in the successful exploration of Venus
and the sustained interest in Mars, it is little wonder that the further scientific
exploration of the moon became a low priority. Eventually, though, coinciding with
a reforming political leadership in the Soviet Union, some plans were advanced. In
1985, the idea of a lunar polar orbiter was resurrected. In 1987, the Institute for Space
Research (IKI) in Moscow gave this mission a target gate of 1993, with a lunar farside
sample recovery in 1996 and an unmanned laboratory on the moon, with rovers, in
2000. In its last plan for space development published in 1989 (The USSR in outer
space - the year 2005), the Soviet Union proposed a lunar polar geophysical orbiter,
but few details were given and only a sketchy illustration was published, suggesting it
would use the Phobos spacecraft design. At one stage, the project acquired the name
Luna 92, indicating a 1992 launch date, but it never got beyond the preliminary design
stage and the money originally set aside for it was used for the Mars 96 planetary
mission instead.
THE REVIVAL? LUNA GLOB
These and other plans were overtaken by political events and the financial crisis that
engulfed the Soviet Union and then Russia in the early 1990s. In the post-Soviet space
programme, the moon was rarely mentioned. The first instance was in summer 1997,
when IKI proposed plans to send a small spacecraft into lunar orbit, using a Molniya
rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia in 2000 (a Proton would be
prohibitively expensive). Over time, this mission acquired the title Luna Glob, or
'lunar globe'. The orbiter would deploy three 250 kg penetrators, modelled on those
developed for the Mars 8 mission the previous year. They would dive into the lunar
surface at some speed, burrowing seismic and heat flow instruments under the lunar
surface, leaving transmitters just above the surface. With small nuclear isotopes, they
would transmit for a year, operating as a three-point network to collect information
on moonquakes and heat flow. A number of variations on these themes appeared, but