Luna 9, soft or hard lander?

" wrote in message
oups.com

Are probes like the soviet Luna 9 & 13 considered soft landers or hard
landers?

They're actually called lunar impactors. Get it? (I didn't think so)
-
Brad Guth


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Have we yet a proven fly-by-rocket lander, much less that of an
AI/robotic capable lander?

Got prototype of anything to demonstrate as a drop from good altitude
and safely down-range capable lander?
-
Brad Guth


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(Henry Spencer) writes:

In article .com,
wrote:
Are probes like the soviet Luna 9 & 13 considered soft landers or hard
landers? Years ago, all the sources that I came across insisted that
soft landers had to use braking rockets to cut velocity, and that the
Lunas (and, by extention, probes that use airbags, like MER) were
survivable hard landers, ejected by a bus which then crashed onto the
surface. Is this distinction still used?

That terminology isn't much heard now, perhaps because we now also have
*really* hard landers: penetrators, which come in at 200-300m/s (vs. the
10-20m/s acceptable for airbag or crushable-padding systems, and the
0-5m/s typical of rocket landing). It was played up in the 60s to
emphasize the technical superiority of Surveyor 1 over Luna 9.

Note that *all* these systems need braking rockets for a lunar landing,
because an undecelerated lunar impact is 2000-3000m/s (even from lunar
orbit, it's 1700m/s or so)

The early, unsuccessful Ranger lunar probes (numbers 3 to 5) intended to
carry out what they called a rough landing of an instrument package on
the moon. Braked by a solid rocket, the package was to be cushioned in
a balsa enclosure and surrounded by fluids. It would hit the moon at 61
m/sec, taking 3000 g's.

Chris Jones wrote:

The early, unsuccessful Ranger lunar probes (numbers 3 to 5) intended to
carry out what they called a rough landing of an instrument package on
the moon. Braked by a solid rocket, the package was to be cushioned in
a balsa enclosure and surrounded by fluids. It would hit the moon at 61
m/sec, taking 3000 g's.



I always liked the part where the two .22 caliber bullets fired out
through the balsa sphere to vent the liquid freon after the inner
insturment sphere aligned itself facing upwards.
Yup, this is an American probe- we haven't been on the Moon ten minutes,
and already we've opened fire and started Chlorofluorocarbon pollution. :-D

Pat

On 15 Sep 2006 13:50:10 -0700, "
wrote:

Are probes like the soviet Luna 9 & 13 considered soft landers or hard
landers?

Hello! I'm the one on Wikipeidia that put the message about Luna 9 on
your talk page.
---
Replace you know what by j to email

Pat Flannery wrote:
You can see it on these drawings of the LK:
http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/l/lkkaluga.jpg
http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/l/lkkaluga.jpg

snip

Yep - I've seen them - and the myspacemuseum pic.

Still not the smoking-PrOP-M-deployment charge that I was looking for.
It's not that I distrust diagrams but we've all seen artfully
airbrushed diagrams (thinking mostly here of Venera and Luna cutaways)
which are just too neat and tidy. I sometimes wonder if the
zond-equivalent of Trotsky hasn't been removed to make the diagrams
more pleasing.

I *could* imagine a slab of crushable material beneath each footpad, as
a means of reducing the jolt to the main legs which appear to be
articulated. Such a block might plausibly be missing from boiler-plates
and EM versions, but in the absence of photographs of such a thing I'll
mentally file it under 'perhaps'. For all we know the material may not
have been canonical aluminium honeycomb.

Ah well - thanks Pat, for digging around.

-James Garry

wrote:


Still not the smoking-PrOP-M-deployment charge that I was looking for.
It's not that I distrust diagrams but we've all seen artfully
airbrushed diagrams (thinking mostly here of Venera and Luna cutaways)
which are just too neat and tidy. I sometimes wonder if the
zond-equivalent of Trotsky hasn't been removed to make the diagrams
more pleasing.



I've seen either a photo or video showing the block of honeycomb
material, and am still looking around for a photo showing it.
It might be on one of my videos about the Russian space program, as it
dates from the period just after the LK was revealed and when it was
still in storage rather than on public display.
I'll keep hunting.
As I said, the honeycomb was pretty beat up in the image or video.


I *could* imagine a slab of crushable material beneath each footpad, as
a means of reducing the jolt to the main legs which appear to be
articulated. Such a block might plausibly be missing from boiler-plates
and EM versions, but in the absence of photographs of such a thing I'll
mentally file it under 'perhaps'. For all we know the material may not
have been canonical aluminium honeycomb.



It sure looked exactly like it, with the cells aligned vertically.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:


I've seen either a photo or video showing the block of honeycomb
material, and am still looking around for a photo showing it.
It might be on one of my videos about the Russian space program, as it
dates from the period just after the LK was revealed and when it was
still in storage rather than on public display.
I'll keep hunting.

And I found it! It's in the program "The Russian Right Stuff".
They have an interview with Vasili Mishin where he takes them to the
stored lunar hardware in Moscow. They go over to the LK, and parts of it
are detached and lying on the floor under it.
Mishin picks up one of the landing pads and holds it up to the camera
showing the honeycomb on its bottom, which is chewed up and has numerous
holes it it.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:

And I found it! It's in the program "The Russian Right Stuff".

Gosh!
snip

Mishin picks up one of the landing pads and holds it up to the camera
showing the honeycomb on its bottom, which is chewed up and has numerous
holes it it.

Circularly symmetric and shaped like the image at?
http://www.myspacemuseum.com/lkscan.jpg

Approximately a cake-like shape?
http://www.weihnachtsseiten.de/brauc...-panettone.gif

Thanks Pat - I'll keep an eye out for that Nova programme.

-James Garry

wrote:



Mishin picks up one of the landing pads and holds it up to the camera
showing the honeycomb on its bottom, which is chewed up and has numerous
holes it it.



Circularly symmetric and shaped like the image at?
http://www.myspacemuseum.com/lkscan.jpg



Yup, that's it.

Pat