Earthlings had mark moonshine sway before 1970 . NASA ’s Apollo 11 and 12 mission successfully hauled them back to study — immense scientific accomplishments , of path . One problem . It be $ 142 billion in today ’s clam . Russia ’s answer ? Send a robot instead .
The Soviets were the first to pull in that sending a human to pick up dust is improbably expensive , and , if you ’re the bozo in the pod — peradventure just a piece too dangerous to be deserving it . Their reply was the Luna 16 space investigation , chronicle ’s first robotic workmanship to successfully wreak back an extraterrestrial sample .
The wager were high . To call the outer space race anything but a , well , race , is to express the obvious . But Luna 16 ’s predecessor had lost a literal race , in an almost comically embarrassing moment of Space Age failure — the Luna 15 remote-controlled investigation doss down itself into lunar oblivion , demolish on the Earth’s surface of the synodic month , just minute before Apollo 11 began the slip back to Earth .
So for Russia , it was fourth dimension to get serious — and tight .
A successful robo - drilling effort would necessitate a craft that could set ashore itself gently without damaging the tender boring equipment inside . The craft itself — a knotty mound of pods and landing apparatus that still look like science fiction compared to today ’s sterilized blank space affairs — gracefully maneuvered onto the surface of the moon ’s Sea of Fertility , using a delicate pair of line of descent locomotive engine that stopped firing only 20 meter above the surface , before it clamped down and waste no time boring . Luna 16 , unlike her older sister , down lightly . Seven minute later , the Russian digger was done , having sucked up a sample of basalt rock 35 mm late into the Sun Myung Moon ’s surface , where it would be stored and analyze back on earth .
A day later , its top plane section blasted off , dusty consignment deep down , leaving the other half behind to immortalise and broadcast datum from the Sun Myung Moon ’s aerofoil . Luna 16 ’s cap , dribble a scant 101 gram of lunar rock , crash safely into the Kazakhstani steppe , carrying what was described as a “ grayish brown ” dust . That might sound dull , but this dust was later sell for $ 442,500 at auction ( though not before a bit was exchanged for some NASA lunar month rock as a motion of goodwill ) .
The missionary station was meek , perhaps , as was the cargo . But Luna 16 ’s legacy is n’t just its old ability to scrape powder off the synodic month and scud back to earth , but its cogent evidence that robot can do some earnestly nerveless stuff for us . Sending robots to work in space in the 70 put mitigated the glamorize ( and , during that epoch , heavily - politicize ) aspiration notion of the Man In Space . Where our hands ( and head ) were want , increasingly , were on the flat coat , where brilliant applied scientist and scientist of all shades on both sides of the Iron Curtain worked to realize the fact that sometimes it ’s a matter of find the correct bot for the job .
Theincredible succeeder of the Mars Rovers ? At least in part ( and in principle ) , thanks Luna 16 — and well-chosen 40th natal day .
https://gizmodo.com/mars-rovers-three-years-running-and-smarter-too-225070
DustrocksRussiaSpace
Daily Newsletter
Get the best technical school , scientific discipline , and culture tidings in your inbox day by day .
News from the time to come , delivered to your present .
Please take your hope newssheet and submit your email to raise your inbox .
You May Also Like
