Word: luna
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After maintaining an enigmatic silence about their successful soft landing on the moon, the Russians finally answered some questions last week and gave Western scientists a chance to check their own interpretation of Luna 9's remarkable photographs...
...news conference in Mos cow, top Soviet scientists disclosed that Luna 9's instrumented, picture-taking payload stood only 2 ft. high and weighed a mere 220 Ibs. The remaining bulk of the 3,428-lb. craft that the Russians fired into space consisted large ly of fuel and the retrorockets that slowed Luna 9's final descent. In addition, the payload was detached from its rocket engines just before impact and hurled to one side, well away from the area that was disturbed by the fiery blasts of the descending retrorockets...
Meteor Bombardment. The Russians confirmed that Luna 9 had found no dust on the moon. Instead, it hit a surface that consisted of hard, porous, volcanic soil formed from lava that had crumbled during billions of years of drastic temperature changes and bombardment by meteors and solar particles. Inhospitable as it is, such a surface could probably bear the weight of both heavy space vehicles and men. The major obstacle remaining before man can fly to the moon, concluded Soviet Academy of Sciences President Mstislav Keldysh, "is the problem of returning a cosmonaut to earth. I think it is easier...
Western experts had speculated that the landing-site time had been picked so that Luna could begin operating near the start of a two-week period of lunar daylight. They figured it would have about 14 days of continuous sunshine to keep its solar batteries charged. Instead, the Russians explained, their intention was merely to land and operate Luna 9 during the early lunar morning-before surface temperatures could rise to their maximum of about 250° F. and damage delicate equipment. Thus their ship was equipped only with standard, unrechargeable batteries...
...Because Luna 9 landed in an area that would bask in sunshine for 14 consecutive earth days before lunar nightfall descended, British scientists were hopeful that the spacecraft's solar-powered batteries might last long enough for it to transmit pictures of the same scenes at regular intervals for several days. Then, as the sun gradually moved through its zenith toward the lunar horizon, ridges and rocks would cast changing shadows that would reveal more information about their size and shape. But at week's end the Russians announced that they had completed Luna 9's program...