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| Locked
away in a Russian archive is the incredible scientific treasure of a "lost"
lunar mission launched 27 years ago, which landed a large robot rover called
Lunokhod 2 in the moon's Sea of Serenity. Only a handful of photographs
from this extraordinary and little-known mission have ever been published.
Tens of thousands of images of the most extensive exploration of the moon's
surface ever carried out remain unknown. Was the data lost during the collapse
of the Soviet Union? Can it be found, and recovered? Dr. David West Reynolds
and NASA navigation software specialist Ed Wright at JPL are investigating
the matter via their colleagues and connections in the United States and
Russia,with the hope of unveiling photos of a moon exploration never before
seen outside the Russian Space Agency. |
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PASADENA,
January 18, 2001--After weeks of discussions with Russian planetary scientists,
NASA-JPL navigation software specialist Ed Wright has succeeded in obtaining
three images from the Soviet moon probe Lunokhod 2 never seen in the West.
Russian planetary scientists agreed to send the images to Wright after conferring
about the project.
Transmitted from the moon in 1973, these remarkable images from the Mare
Serenitatis area of the moon show a close-up of the lunar surface, the robot
rover's tracks through moondust "dunes," and a view of the eastern horizon
from the crater Le Monnier. The black-and-white photos are far better than
those taken by Lunokhod 1 in 1971, and approach the quality of those beamed
back by the stationary U.S. Surveyor probes in the 1960's.
These images have been unknown to the world lunar science community for
over 27 years, and as of last week only two individuals outside of Russia
had ever seen them: Wright and Phaeton Group Lunokhod Project Director Dr.
David West Reynolds. Released personally to Wright, the images have been
authorized for limited distribution to the principals of Phaeton Group and
NASA scientists collaborating with Phaeton on the project. The images will
not be made public until further arrangements are settled with our Russian
colleagues.
These long-sought images will serve to demonstrate the photographic quality
and scientific value of the Lunokhod mission data, only small portions of
which have ever been published or released to the outside world. Hundreds
of never-seen lunar panoramas remain locked away in Russia, along with tens
of thousands of still images, now beginning to decay after almost three
decades of storage. Reynolds hopes to rescue this scientific treasure trove
and digitize the entire mission archive, preserving it for the future on
CD-ROMs. The project has won endorsement from American lunar and planetary
scientists at NASA's National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Maryland,
which will serve as the data's official repository if the Phaeton project
is successful. NASA NSSDC Director Dr. Joseph King has penned official letters
of support for Phaeton's endeavor.
NASA has been promoting the "faster, better, cheaper" philosophy for some
years now, but it would be hard to beat the performance of producing new
images of the moon's surface in a couple of months of e-mail diplomacy.
If the full Phaeton project succeeds, Reynolds says, "the data return for
U.S. scientists will be the equivalent of a new mission to the moon."
Reynolds determined to hunt down the Lunnokhod images during research for
his recent book on NASA's Apollo program (APOLLO: The Epic Journey To The
Moon--Harcourt, 2002). "There is such a limited body of photography from
the surface of the Moon," Reynolds says. "I was interested in seeing all
that there was, and was surprised to find that no one seemed to have the
Lunokhod imagery available, even at NASA's National Space Sciences Data
Center. I asked our contact Ed Wright at JPL to see if he could help us,
and the initial results have been very encouraging." |
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