Word: lunokhod
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Even as their own Mars vehicle raced toward its goal, the Soviets had another reason to be pleased. Six months after its landing, the eight-wheeled moon rover, Lunokhod I, was still continuing its lunar explorations, digging up soil samples with a conical drill and analyzing them with on-board instruments. It was also photographing the moonscape and scanning the heavens with an X-ray telescope that has already detected at least two sources of X-ray emissions in distant space. So overjoyed were the Russians by Lunokhod's performance that Pravda was moved to proletarian metaphor and compared...
Only slightly less overjoyed were high NASA officials, who badly needed a morale booster after congressional cuts in the space agency's appropriations, the near-disastrous flight of Apollo 13 last April, and the recent successes of Soviet space robots. Indeed, the unmanned moon rover, Lunokhod 1-which came back to life last week on the lunar surface 900 miles north of Apollo 14's Fra Mauro landing site-seemed very much on the mind of Acting NASA Administrator George Low. The flight of Apollo 14, Low said, "demonstrated that man belongs in space, that man can achieve...
...national mood has changed sharply since Neil Armstrong made the first human footprints on the lunar soil 18 months ago. Public concern has shifted from space to more pressing earthly problems. In addition, the Russians have dramatically demonstrated that unattended robots like Lunokhod 1 -still alive and moving after eight weeks on the moon-may eventually achieve some of the goals of manned flight at a fraction of the cost and with none of the risks to life. Thus, as it prepares to launch Apollo 14 and Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stu Roosa and Edgar Mitchell on man's fourth...
Distant Landscapes. The Russians also made a bow to international cooperation in space. Lunokhod carried a French-built array of 14 corner-shaped mirrors designed to reflect long-distance laser beams from observatories in southern France and the Crimea. A similar reflector left behind by Apollo 11 on the Sea of Tranquility has already enabled U.S. scientists to measure the distance between earth and moon with an accuracy of less than a foot. Indeed, U.S. observers think that the Soviets might be interested in testing such a device as a means of navigating future moon robots...
...week's end Lunokhod had clearly lived up to Soviet expectations. To cope with the frigid temperatures of the approaching two-week-long lunar night, the Russians will probably power down the vehicle, allowing it to "hibernate" until it can again draw energy from the sun. If it survives the extreme cold ( -250°F.), Kaminski predicted, it might well resume its explorations, eventually traveling hundreds of miles from the landing site-provided no other calamity befalls it. The Russians themselves were not inclined to make any risky predictions. But they did say that in the future more advanced...