When, by whom and how was Lunar soil first brought to Earth? Arguments and counterarguments: American lunar soil samples are not from the Moon.

Lunar soil brought back by the Apollo missions

According to the official version of NASA, as a result of six antics on the surface of the Moon, 382 kg of lunar soil were delivered to Earth as part of the Apollo program. Part of it consisted of large fractions (stones), part of small ones. Below is a list of allegedly successful American missions and the weight of lunar soil delivered "from the Moon" by each of them.

Mission Mass Year
Apollo 11 22 kg 1969
Apollo 12 34 kg 1969
Apollo 14 43 kg 1971
Apollo 15 77 kg 1971
Apollo 16 95 kg 1972
Apollo 17 111 kg 1972

And here is the chronology of the appearance of Soviet lunar soil on Earth and its weight.

Mission Mass Year
Luna-16 101 g 1970
Luna 20 55 1972
Luna-24 170 g 1976

The study of two types of lunar matter - regolith and stones - has a fundamental difference in terms of exposing the forgery of NASA, which falsified the lunar soil by one method or another. A new piece of evidence is added to the physicochemical properties of a certain substance, a form that leaves an indelible imprint on photographs and closes the substitution in the future, when the required number of moon rocks, as a result of technological progress, is at the disposal of NASA.

Considering the mass distribution of gift stones by the US government under the guise of lunar ones (and this is more than half a thousand individual samples)), and also taking into account the size of one or another sample on the experimental table of one or another scientist, an investigation of all the circumstances of the study of lunar soil and verification of scientific data should go in two directions - physicochemical and related to the shape of a particular sample.

If a group of scientists announced a series of studies of a substance given to them by NASA under the guise of lunar soil, or the US government donated a certain stone to a particular country, in order to statistically evaluate the phenomenon, it is necessary to collect available information (including photographs) about the fate of the samples. After all, if, as the leading US selenologist Judith Frondell claims, NASA gives scientists microscopic doses of lunar soil, and then selects them, passing them on to others,

Samples that are not consumed in analysis are retrieved by NASA as "returned" samples that are recycled to other users as appropriate.

then it is appropriate to say that the United States managed to do nothing more than repeat the feat of Soviet cosmonautics, delivering LGs to Earth with the help of, for example, Serverers, in approximately the same volumes in which domestic "Moons" were delivered to Earth.

Everything that is connected with the statistics of the moon-stone distribution, with photographs, with the fate of the presents, with the size of the objects of study, etc. - described in the article "Stones brought back by the Apollo missions" .

Circumstances and results of NASA lunar soil research.

Hundreds of studies by hundreds of researchers are posted on the Harvard website, but without any indication that the lunar soil left the United States. Studies of lunar soil by groups of scientists from different countries were carried out in research centers in the United States. Thus, control over the total weight of soil issued outside the United States, which has passed more or less independent scientific verification, was avoided.

An Internet search engine gives 124,000 links to “work on the American lunar soil”, but almost all of them were done in the United States, and in the case of the study of soil allegedly delivered “from the Moon” by the A-11 mission, the word “almost” can be safely removed .

Distribution of soil allegedly delivered to Earth by the crew of Apollo 12

Slightly better - even if NASA is to be believed - is the situation with the study outside the United States of the soil "delivered to Earth" by the crew of Apollo 12.

We open the book of the historian of the Apollo program Ya. Golovanov.

NASA said 1,620 individual moon rock samples in the form of rocks, debris, sand and dust will be distributed to 159 U.S. and 54 foreign scientists from 16 countries.
- Ya. Golovanova "The Truth About the Apollo Program"

According to NASA, such a distribution did take place, but it was the first and last "mass" distribution of "lunar soil" in the history of this organization, allegedly taking place in February 1970.

From the outside, the list looks impressive, and the total claimed weight (13 kg) impresses even the most determined skeptics. However, the list of non-Anglo-Saxon recipients (and minus the Max Planck Institute, Germany, which is discussed separately) and the portions of soil they accepted are discouraging in their weightlessness.

The list is already condensed.

South Korea - 1 gr. moonstones (rocks), 2 gr. moon dust (fines)
Italy - 11 (4+7) gr. rocks, 1.5 gr. fines
Belgium - 8 (6+2) gr. rocks, 4.5 (2.5+2) gr. fines
Norway - 5 gr. rocks, 1 gr. fines
Japan - 81.5 (21 + 50 + 10.5) gr. rocks, 2 (1+1) gr. fines
France - 7 (3 + 4) gr. rocks, 3 (1+2) gr. fines
Czechoslovakia - 1 gr. rocks, 1 gr. fines
Switzerland - 34 gr. rocks, 16 gr. fines
Spain - 1 gr. rocks, 1 gr. fines
Finland - 18 gr. rocks, 0 gr. fines
India - 12 gr. rocks, 1 gr. fines
Total: 179.5 gr. rocks, 33 gr. fines. Or 1.3% of the total weight of 13 kg.

Of the 1,620 samples outside the United States, even if NASA is to be believed, only 27 soil samples got in, in other words - 1.5% from the total. And those are a big question, because recipient countries and institutions categorically refuse to recognize the import of portions.

But only two US scientists received stones and regolith with a total weight of almost 10 kg, which 50 times more than the rest of the world combined, on behalf of which the Americans landed "on the moon."

Despite the cyclopean American portions, in 1975 - 7 years (!) After the supposed delivery of almost half a ton of moon rocks to Earth, a group of leading Soviet selenologists consisting of A.P. Vinogradova, I.I. Cherkasova, V.V. Shvarev and a number of other scientists, the following recognition was made:

There are three series of experiments in which the weight of the samples involved is 200 and 20 g. There are no two or six-kilogram stones in the list. It is impossible to believe that for five whole years Soviet scientists did not know anything about research in the United States of such gigantic samples.

At the same time, having the widest access to foreign specialized scientific literature and periodicals (the head of the GEOKHI of the USSR Academy of Sciences, A.P. Vinogradov, moreover, was a regular participant in the annual regolith-Houston shows). Moreover, in his work "The Soil of the Moon" A.P. Vinogradov, I.I. Cherkasov and V.V. It is the American scientists who are grateful to Shvarev for the books and articles sent to them on the studies of the lunar soil by the Americans. Books in which there is not a word about the huge moon rocks allegedly explored by O "Leary and Perkins.

Also in 1975, leading US selenologist Judith Frondell informs readers indirectly that By the second half of the 1970s, none of the US scientists had yet received more or less large samples of lunar rock.

The very small amounts of matter that researchers had to deal with, single grains no larger than a few microns or fractions of a micron, of course, did not allow accurate and reliable diagnosis of all mineral species even using the most modern microscopes and microanalyzers.

Who misinforms the scientific world of the planet: the leading Soviet and American selenologists of the 70s, or someone else, much more modern to us, having nothing to do with science itself, but having at its disposal the "world media" and the printing press?

Non-oxidizable iron film - the calling card of the lunar soil!

According to legend, the first lunar soil was delivered by NASA to Earth in the summer of 1969, and the Soviet one only in the fall of the following year. But it was Soviet, and not American scientists and scientists from other countries of the world who studied American lunar soil, found in lunar samples birthmark of any lunar soil - a thin film of pure non-oxidizable iron.

Pure iron in the lunar soil - regolith - was discovered immediately. It covers the thinnest (one tenth of a micron!) film most of its surface . <…>It is paradoxical, but true: a secret can be “hidden” on the surface much more reliably than in depth. And so did nature with the lunar regolith. Pure, reduced iron occupies here the thinnest layer with a thickness of about 20 angstroms. Further ordinary oxides.
- G. Beregovoy "Space - to earthlings"

The solar wind, or rather, the protons contained in it, determined the process of depreciation of the lunar soil. It is known that any physical objects, if they consist of crystals, especially large crystals, are easily destroyed. So, under the influence of the solar wind, a kind of vitrification of the surface occurs, so the soil becomes very dense and is not subject to oxidation even under terrestrial conditions...

When I gave a talk on this topic at the California Institute of Technology (1972), which was the umbrella organization for the study of lunar rocks, one of the founding fathers of lunar geochemistry, Professor Jerry Wasserburg, was present. After my speech, he came up to me and said: "All this, of course, is interesting, but this cannot be.

We Americans, when we received the lunar soil, distributed it to the top fifty labs in the world, and those labs did all sorts of experiments with it, but they didn't find the phenomenon you're talking about.
- Academician Oleg Bogatikov "Arguments and Facts"

The 50 best laboratories in the world in two years of research failed to notice what they immediately saw in the Soviet GEOKHI. The visiting card of the lunar soil - reduced iron and other non-oxidized metals in a thin surface layer, scientists from the best laboratories in the world did not find for the simple reason that the soil of the A-11 and A-12 missions was not of lunar origin. The significance of the presence of the named film is so enormous that it is just as impossible not to notice it as it is impossible not to see the Moscow Kremlin, being on Red Square.

M. Keldysh: If you understand how such iron is obtained on the Moon and teach us how to produce it on Earth, then this will pay off all the costs of space research.
- G. Beregovoy "Space - to earthlings."

You can not notice anything, but not the most important feature of the material under study. Despite this impossibility, Professor Begemann (Prof. Dr. Friedrich Begemann) from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz (Germany) did the impossible: he guaranteed the absolute identity of a substance having an inoxidizable film of pure iron (emphasis on the word "inoxidizable"), and a substance , which does not have such a feature.

Begemann was the first and last in the world to announce that the Max Planck Institute at some mysterious time (not reported) received (from whom - not reported) Soviet lunar soil (the weight of the soil is not reported), which the German professor found (how he searched - not reported ) indistinguishable from American soil.

From whom, when and in what quantity the Soviet regolith was obtained by the Germans, Begemann, as we see, was embarrassed to say, but he did not hesitate to say that the insinuations about Hollywood trips to the moon had been put to an end. On what basis is unknown.

The resourceful defenders of the scam were not at a loss here either, explaining the Soviet priority in the sensational discovery by the fact that the Americans kept their soil very carefully - in an inert nitrogen atmosphere, without coming into contact with the earth's atmosphere ("took care of it for future generations of scientists"). However, the photo chronicle of those times does not leave stone unturned on these conjectures, even if they are as weighty as in the photo below.

NASA Cutting Room

(You can comment under the second part of the article)

aslan wrote on December 24th, 2015

And what about the lunar soil, it is quite calmly stored in the storage of lunar soil, located on the territory of the Space Center. Johnson in Houston. We will talk about him today at. I will add only a small excerpt from Wikipedia about lunar soil: for the first time, lunar soil was delivered to Earth by the crew of the Apollo 11 spacecraft in July 1969 in the amount of 21.7 kg.

During the lunar missions under the Apollo program, a total of 382 kg of lunar soil was delivered to Earth. The Luna-16 automatic station delivered 101 g of soil on September 24, 1970 (already after the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 expeditions). "Luna-16", "Luna-20" and "Luna-24" delivered soil from three regions of the Moon: the Sea of Plenty, the continental area near the Ameghino crater and the Sea of Crisis in the amount of 324, and it was transferred to the GEOKHI RAS for research and storage.

Source to the original as usual at the end of the post

Today, we, Oleg Skripochka and me, had an amazing opportunity to get into the storage of lunar soil, located on the territory of the Space Center. Johnson. Andrea Mozi, Oleg Skripochka, me, Ryan Zeigler. Andrea is the lab's most experienced researcher and has been working here for over 30 years. Ryan is the senior vault curator.

Inside Knowledge #31 is a laboratory that stores and studies materials that arrived on Earth from outer space. Almost all of the lunar soil brought by the Apollo crews from the Moon is stored here.

The laboratory is entered through a series of small airlocks that prevent contaminants from entering the laboratory. The cleanest room has a cleanliness class of 1000. Phones and cameras are wiped with alcohol and placed in the gateway.

We ourselves put on bathrobes, shoe covers, hats and go through the airlock. Only masks are missing to complete the picture. This whole set has a rather funny name - bunny suit

In fact, initially the moonstones were stored in a completely different building, here, on the territory of the Center. Johnson. It provided for multi-zone protection: a large number of gateways, removable overalls and shower rooms. Then no one knew if extraterrestrial artifacts contain dangerous viruses or bacteria. Scientists tried to observe planetary quarantine. And the samples themselves were kept in vacuum boxes, which, in turn, prevented them from air pollution.

It soon became clear that there was no life on the moon. In addition, the vacuum boxes constantly leaked, still sucking in air and contaminating the samples. Then the entire lunar soil was transferred to a new storage facility, without such a harsh quarantine regime, and the vacuum was replaced with an atmosphere of dry nitrogen under excess pressure.

In each subsequent room, the pressure is slightly higher than in the previous one, in order to avoid the entry of a dirty atmosphere from outside. On the walls are installed in such pressure gauges

He drew attention to the strange units of measurement of pressure - inches of water column (not millimeters of water column, not pascals and not bars). Ryan said that he himself does not remember how to quickly translate this pressure into understandable units. :))

By the way, now the old building is still working and serves as a laboratory for studying fresh samples of extraterrestrial materials - meteorites, comets, cosmic dust.

Inside the clean room, here are such glavboxes (not from the word “main”, if anyone does not know, but from the bourgeois “glove-box”, which means “glove box” in translation into the great and mighty).

White bubbles sticking out of the box on the sides are rubber gloves, if again someone has not penetrated. There is always excess pressure inside the box. And so that the gloves do not stick out in all directions, white rag covers are put on them.

In this box, for example, the largest soil samples are displayed. Some have their own stories.

Here it is, for example, "Belt Rock". Brought by the Apollo 15 expedition.

The story is like this. David Scott and James Irwin were exploring a distant part of the Moon and at some point received an instruction from the Mission Control Center to return the rover to the landing module due to the restrictions on the coolant of the suits. On the way back, Scott noticed an interesting pattern of basalt to the side of the rover. Realizing that the MCC would not allow them to stop, under the pretext of needing to tighten the loosened belt to attract tears from the rover, he quickly photographed the stone, took it and sat back down. All this time, his partner distracted the MCC with a description of the surrounding landscapes. The deception was revealed only after the expedition returned home, when the number of samples delivered did not agree with the reports of the astronauts. And the stone was called so - "Belt Rock"

Photo courtesy of NASA. And that stone. Sometimes you can’t even believe it, here it is, this very stone that was 380,000 km from here.

And this sample is a fragment of the largest moon rock brought from the moon.

Initially, a piece of breccia #61016 weighed 11.7 kg and was sawn into several pieces. It was just very difficult to work with him in a glove box - he did not fit in the airlock. By the way, he has his own name, the astronauts called him "Big Muley" (Big Muley - Wikipedia), in honor of the geologist Bill Mulberger from the ground flight support team.

A couple of remaining samples from this box

Information on each of the samples can be easily found on the Internet, knowing only the serial number.

Each new piece formed when sawing stones is documented. Its position relative to other parts of the stone is documented, it is photographed, and a number is assigned to it. Everything is collected, even the dust left after cutting. Naturally, everything is weighed before and after the study.

Samples from different regions of the Moon have different mineral compositions. To exclude mixing of the material and contamination of one sample with another, they are examined in different boxes. This one, for example, is for the Apollo 17 samples.

An interesting specimen, similar to an egg. In the laboratory, they call it “moon egg”. I have not found anything about him yet, but he is very interesting: initially almost spherical, covered with a thin layer of glass.

The only understandable way to create such a ball is to throw a round piece of rock (a fragment of a meteorite, for example) through liquid magma. But no one will ever be able to know the true nature of this phenomenon. We can only guess.

This is also one of the most famous artifacts delivered by the Apollo 15 expedition - "Genesis Rock" ("The Stone of Genesis", as the reporters called it).

At first, the astronauts believed they had discovered a fragment of the original lunar crust. But after analysis, it turned out that it was simply anorthite, only very old, some 4.1 billion years old.

You can look at it a little closer.

And here he is in a lunar landscape.

An interesting fact: in 2002, an intern doing practice here, his girlfriend and friends from the laboratory stole a 270-kg safe with samples of lunar soil and meteorites. The value of the safe, which contained 113 grams of lunar soil and meteorites, was about a million dollars. Soon, the comrades were detained while trying to sell stolen goods and went to prison. And the merchants quickly took advantage of this and released the book "Sex On The Moon" - they say, after the theft, the student and his girlfriend had sex right on the bed with moonstones. Romance, b..t!

By the way, to see or study moon rocks, it is not at all necessary to come to this laboratory. Samples of lunar soil can be borrowed upon request.

A tube of regolith that was recently returned to the lab.

And here are the samples used for demonstration.

A photo that makes you smile :) Yes, there are even such trash cans. :)

The fact is that all used packages from under the lunar material are collected separately from ordinary garbage and destroyed. So that no one would be tempted to find a bag with the remnants of moon dust and appropriate it for themselves.

One of the cabinets in the sample storage.

The door to the vault itself weighs 18,000 pounds, almost 8 tons. Two combination locks, the code from each of them is available only to one employee. That is, to get inside, you need to strain at least two guardians.

The building itself is strong enough to withstand any tornado and 8-meter high water. “But 8.5 meters is already bad,” Ryan jokes.

The repository contains not only samples of moon rocks brought by the Apollo expeditions, but also samples obtained by the Soviet automatic stations Luna (16,20,24).

And in this box are solar wind samples collected by the Genesis spacecraft at the L1 Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system. More precisely, what was left of them, as the descent capsule plopped into the Utah desert with a failed parachute.

Case with lunar soil cores.

When asked why he was fenced off and the sign was hung up, Ryan replied that no one was stomping around him, they say that the core can be mixed from shaking.

This was such an interesting visit.

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In the United States, after a picture taken during the landing of astronauts on the moon, a man was found without a spacesuit, a scandal erupted. This is not the only inconsistency. About one of them - in this material.

It is believed that the Americans brought back 378 kg of lunar soil and rocks from the Moon. At least that's what NASA says. This is almost four centners. It is clear that only astronauts could deliver such an amount of soil: no space stations can do it.

The rocks have been photographed, transcribed, and are regular extras on NASA's "lunar" films. In many of these films, the astronaut-geologist of Apollo 17, Dr. Harrison Schmidt, who allegedly personally collected many such stones on the Moon, acts as an expert and commentator.

It is logical to expect that with such lunar wealth, America will shock them, demonstrate them in every possible way, and even to someone, and will roll off 30-50 kilograms from the bounty of their main rival. Nate, they say, explore, make sure of our successes ... But for some reason it just doesn’t work out with this. We were given little soil. But “ours” (again, according to NASA) received 45 kg of lunar soil and stones.

True, some particularly caustic researchers have made a calculation according to the relevant publications of scientific centers and could not find convincing evidence that these 45 kg reached the laboratories of even Western scientists. Moreover, according to them, it turns out that at present no more than 100 g of American lunar soil roams from laboratory to laboratory in the world, so that usually the researcher received half a gram of rock.

That is, NASA treats the lunar soil like a stingy knight treats gold: it keeps the cherished centners in its cellars in securely locked chests, giving researchers only miserable grams. The USSR did not escape this fate either.

In our country at that time, the leading scientific organization for all studies of lunar soil was the Institute of Geochemistry of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now - GEOKHI RAS). The head of the meteoritics department of this institute, Dr. M.A. Nazarov reports: “The Americans transferred to the USSR 29.4 grams (!) of lunar regolith (in other words, lunar dust) from all the Apollo expeditions, and from our collection of Luna-16, 20 and 24 samples it was issued abroad 30.2 g. In fact, the Americans exchanged lunar dust with us, which any automatic station can deliver, although the cosmonauts should have brought heavy cobblestones, and it is most interesting to look at them.

What is NASA going to do with the rest of the lunar "good"? Oh, it's a song.

“The decision has been made in the United States to keep the bulk of the delivered samples completely intact until new, more advanced methods of studying them are developed,” write competent Soviet authors, from whose pen more than one book on lunar soil has come out.

“It is necessary to spend the minimum amount of material, leaving intact and uncontaminated most of each individual sample for study by future generations of scientists,” explains the NASA position of the American specialist J. A. Wood.

Obviously, the American specialist believes that no one will ever fly to the Moon, neither now nor in the future. And therefore, it is necessary to protect centners of lunar soil more than the eyes. At the same time, modern scientists are humiliated: they can examine every single atom in a substance with their instruments, but they are denied confidence - they have not matured. Or the snout did not come out. NASA's insistence on future scientists is more like a convenient excuse to cover up a disappointing fact: there are no moon rocks or quintals of lunar soil in its pantries.

Another oddity: after the completion of the "lunar" flights, NASA suddenly began to experience an acute shortage of money for their research. Here is what one of the American researchers writes as of 1974: “A significant part of the samples will be stored as a reserve at the space flight center in Houston. Reductions in funding will reduce the number of researchers and slow down the pace of research.”

After spending $25 billion to deliver lunar samples, NASA suddenly discovered that there was no money left for their research ...

The history of the exchange of Soviet and American soil is also interesting. Here is a message dated April 14, 1972 from the main official publication of the Soviet period - the Pravda newspaper:

“On April 13, NASA representatives visited the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The transfer of samples of lunar soil from among those delivered to Earth by the Soviet automatic station "Luna-20" took place. At the same time, a sample of lunar soil obtained by the crew of the American Apollo 15 spacecraft was handed over to Soviet scientists. The exchange was made in accordance with the agreement between the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and NASA, signed in January 1971."

Now we need to go through the deadlines. July 1969 Apollo 11 astronauts allegedly bring 20 kg of lunar soil. The USSR does not give anything from this amount. The USSR does not yet have lunar soil at this point.

September 1970 Our station "Luna-16" delivers lunar soil to Earth, and from now on, Soviet scientists have something to offer in exchange. This puts NASA in a difficult position. But NASA expects that in early 1971 it will be able to automatically deliver its lunar soil to Earth, and in January 1971, an exchange agreement has already been concluded based on this. But the exchange itself does not occur for another 10 months. Apparently, something went wrong with the US with automatic delivery. And the Americans are beginning to pull the rubber.

July 1971 In good faith, the USSR unilaterally transfers 3 g of soil from Luna-16 to the USA, but does not receive anything from the USA, although the exchange agreement was signed six months ago, and NASA supposedly already has 96 kg of lunar soil (from Apollo 11, Apollo 12 and Apollo 14). Another 9 months go by.

April 1972 NASA finally hands over a lunar soil sample. It was allegedly delivered by the crew of the American Apollo 15 spacecraft, although 8 months have passed since the Apollo 15 flight (July 1971). By this time, 173 kg of moon rocks (from Apollo 11, Apollo 12, Apollo 14 and Apollo 15) allegedly already lie in NASA pantries.

Soviet scientists receive from these riches a certain sample, the parameters of which are not reported in the Pravda newspaper. But thanks to Dr. M.A. Nazarov, we know that this sample consisted of regolith and did not exceed 29 g in mass.

It is very likely that until about July 1972, the United States had no real lunar soil at all. Apparently, somewhere in the first half of 1972, the Americans got the first grams of real lunar soil, which was delivered from the Moon automatically. It was only then that NASA showed a willingness to make an exchange.

And in recent years, the lunar soil of the Americans (more precisely, what they pass off as lunar soil) has begun to disappear altogether. In the summer of 2002, a huge number of samples of lunar matter - a safe weighing almost 3 centners - disappeared from the storerooms of the museum of the NASA American Space Center. Johnson in Houston. Have you ever tried stealing a 300 kg safe from the space center grounds? And do not try: too hard and dangerous work. But the thieves, on the trail of which the police went surprisingly quickly, succeeded easily. Tiffany Fowler and Thad Roberts, who worked in the building at the time of the loss, were arrested by FBI and NASA special agents in a Florida restaurant. Subsequently, the third accomplice, Shae Saur, was also taken into custody in Houston, and then the fourth participant in the crime, Gordon McWater, who facilitated the transportation of stolen goods. The thieves intended to sell the priceless evidence of NASA's lunar mission for $1000-5000 per gram through the site of the Mineralogical Club in Antwerp (Holland). The value of the stolen, according to information from across the ocean, was more than $1 million.

A few years later - a new misfortune. In the United States, in the Virginia Beach area, two small sealed plastic disc-shaped boxes with samples of meteorite and lunar material, judging by the markings on them, were stolen from a car by unknown attackers. Samples of this kind, according to Space, are being transferred by NASA to special instructors "for training purposes." Before receiving such samples, teachers undergo a special briefing, during which they are taught how to properly handle this US national treasure. And the “national treasure”, it turns out, is so easy to steal... Although it does not look like a theft, but a staged theft in order to get rid of evidence: there is no ground - there are no “uncomfortable” questions.

So, the Soviet designers failed to send a man to the moon. But the Soviet Union did not want to directly admit its defeat. It was here that the statements of some figures came in handy that Soviet cosmonauts never intended to go to the moon. Like, from the very beginning it was supposed to send automatic stations there.

In 1968, when it became clear that the USSR was lagging behind in the lunar race, an original idea arose to bring soil from the moon before the Americans landed there.

The proposal to create a rocket-space system for delivering a lunar pound to Earth was signed on January 10, 1968, and on February 28, 1968, the draft design of the apparatus was already approved. At that time, the Lavochkin NPO created the E-8 lunar rover for the movement of an astronaut on the Moon and the E-8LS station for filming from the Moon's orbit the proposed landing areas for unmanned and manned lunar spacecraft of the L-3 complex. For these devices, a special landing stage "KT" was developed. The head of the NPO, Georgy Nikolaevich Babakin, suggested using it in an apparatus for delivering lunar soil to Earth, called "E-8-5". If everything had gone smoothly, then the small descent vehicle would have delivered 100 grams of lunar soil to Earth in 11 days and 16 hours.

The landing stage was modified as follows. It was equipped with a soil intake device (GZU), which consisted of a drilling rig with an electric drive system and a drilling tool, a mechanism for removing the GZU - a rod on which the drilling rig was mounted, and drives that move the rod in the vertical and horizontal planes (in azimuth and corner of the spot).

Two telephotometers were installed on the landing platform to select the drilling location (the azimuth of the MLS turn). Lamps were installed parallel to the telephotometers to illuminate the working area of the soil intake device.

The instrument compartment, shaped like a torus, served as a launch pad for a return rocket. The return rocket was an independent rocket unit with a single-chamber liquid-propellant engine and a system of three spherical tanks with nitrogen tetroxide and asymmetric dimethylhydrazine fuel components. The diameter of the central tank is 67 cm, the diameter of each of the peripheral tanks is 53 cm. Steering nozzles served to stabilize the rocket in the active area. A cylindrical instrument compartment with a diameter of 56 cm was fixed on the central tank, inside which electronic calculating and solving and gyroscopic devices of the rocket control system, devices of the meter-range onboard radio complex with a telemetry system, batteries and on-board automation devices were installed. Given the short flight time of the return rocket, disposable silver-zinc batteries were used in the power supply system. Four whip receiving-transmitting antennas were installed on the outer surface of the instrument compartment.

In the upper part of the instrument compartment, with the help of metal tie-down bands, a spherical salvage vehicle weighing 36 kg was attached, which is separated from the rocket by a radio command from the Earth. The rescue vehicle was a metal ball with a diameter of 50 cm, on the outer surface of which a heat-shielding coating was applied from an asbestos-textolite outer layer and a filler from glass-textolite honeycombs, which protects the vehicle with the equipment installed inside it from exposure to high temperatures when entering the Earth's atmosphere.

The internal volume of the return apparatus was divided into three isolated compartments. In one of them, the designers placed VHF radio direction-finding transmitters, which provide the ability to detect the return vehicle during parachute descent to Earth, a silver-zinc battery, automation elements and a time program device that controls the commissioning of the parachute system.

The second compartment contained a parachute, four elastic antennas for direction-finding transmitters, and two elastic balloons filled with gas, which ensured the necessary position of the return vehicle on the Earth's surface after landing.

The third compartment was a cylindrical container for soil taken from the lunar surface. On one side of the container, there was a receiving opening, hermetically sealed with a special lid after the lunar rock was placed in it.

Among other things, a pennant was installed on the landing stage, and a sign of nationality was installed on the rescue vehicle.

Station "E-8-5", like "E-8", was quite heavy - 5725 kg. The apparatus was to be put into orbit around the Earth first. For this, the Proton-K (UR-500K) rocket was used.

The flight pattern from the moment of launch from Earth to landing on the Moon completely repeated the flight pattern of stations with lunar rovers, except that there were severe restrictions on the choice of landing sites. These restrictions were dictated by the conditions for a direct launch of a return rocket to the Earth after soil sampling. At the same time, the launch time of the return rocket also had a strict time frame.

588 seconds after the launch, the third-stage engine was turned off and the upper stage 11S824 (block "D" from the N1-LZ missile system) was launched. At the 958th second, the "E-8-5" apparatus with the "D" block entered the near-Earth orbit. 35 minutes after the launch, the station's landing gear was deployed, after 66 minutes, the complex was oriented, and 70 minutes later, the engine of block "D" was restarted and transferred the station to the flight path to the Moon. During the flight, two corrections were envisaged. After 4 days 7 hours after the launch, "E-8-5" went into a circumlunar orbit with a height of 120 km and an orbital period of 2 hours. A day later, the first correction was to be carried out to descend above the selected landing point to a height of 20 km, and a day later, the second one in order to correct the plane of the vehicle's approach to the landing point. Finally, after 7 days 16 hours, the braking propulsion system was launched, and 6 minutes later the station landed on the lunar surface.

After taking a sample of lunar soil and 8 days 18 hours after takeoff from the Earth, the upper stage launched from the station to the Earth, and after 11 days 16 hours its rescue vehicle landed on the territory of the Soviet Union.

However, in astronautics, things often do not go as planned.

On June 16, 1969, during the first launch of station "E-8-5" No. 402, the launch of the propulsion system of block "D" did not occur. The reason was an error in the control system circuit - when the middle adapter of block "D" was reset, the on-board circuit was opened, due to which the command to start the engine did not pass. The station is dead.

And now - July 13, 1969. At 2 hours 54 minutes 41 seconds GMT, station E-8-5 No. 401 was launched, which received the name Luna-15 in official reports. Following it on July 16 at 13:32, Apollo 11 was launched from the Kennedy Space Center.

On July 17 at exactly 10 o'clock Luna-15 entered the selenocentric orbit. And then in the official TASS reports about the flight of the apparatus, convulsive throwing began. Two corrections were first reported on July 19. However, the final TASS report on the flight of the station included corrections on July 18 and 19, as it should have been according to plan. The station's orbit also looked strange after the first correction: instead of a circular height of 120 km, it was elliptical with an apopulation of 221 km and a perilocation of 95 km, although the orbital period (2 hours and 3.5 minutes) was close to the calculated one. The second orbit practically corresponded to the calculated one.

One way or another, but on July 19 Apollo arrived at the Moon and at 17:22 went into a selenocentric orbit.

Based on the calculated flight program and the final TASS report, the first possible moment of landing at the Soviet station came on July 20 at about 19:00. But Luna-15 remained in orbit. There are at least three versions of this. The first - there were malfunctions on board, the second - the gravitational field of the Moon was not sufficiently studied, so they decided to keep the station for another day to study it, the last - the United States turned to the USSR with a request not to carry out active work with the station so as not to interfere with the Apollo landing.

The Apollo 11 lunar module landed at 20 hours 17 minutes and 42 seconds, that is, just over an hour after the estimated landing time of Luna-15. And already on July 21, Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon. And at 1754 hours of the same day, the Eagle takeoff stage left the Moon, taking with it the first soil samples. But even before that, at 15:47, Luna-15 finally switched on its braking propulsion system. Having made 52 turns in the lunar orbit, the station began to land. But the touchdown of the moon did not occur after 6 minutes according to the calculations, but after 4. The station literally crashed into the moon. The fact is that the Soviet ballistics at that time still did not know exactly the relief of the proposed landing area (12 ° N, 60 ° E). And there was a fairly high mountain - the station hit it.

In 1969, the Soviet Union tried twice more to bring lunar soil to Earth with the help of automatic stations.

On September 23, station "E-8-5" No. 403 was launched, but the engine on block "D" did not start when it was turned on for the second time. It’s just that at the time of launch there was no oxidizer (liquid oxygen) in the block, it all leaked out due to the unclosed oxidizer separating valve after the first start. The station remained in low Earth orbit under the name Kosmos-300 and burned up in the atmosphere four days later.

A similar fate awaited the station "E-8-5" No. 404. It was launched on October 22. Due to the failure of one of the units of the radio complex, the reverse turns of the head unit were carried out with a significant error. As a result, by the time the engine was turned on for the second time, the head unit was incorrectly oriented in space. After working out the boost pulse, the automatic station and the booster unit entered the dense layers of the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. In an official TASS report, this device was named Kosmos-305.

The next station "E-8-5" No. 405, launched on February 6, 1970, crashed due to improper operation of the launch vehicle: when the propulsion system of the second stage was launched, as a result of a failure of the pressure indicator in the combustion chamber of one of the engines, a command was sent to turning them off.

Only station "E-8-5" No. 406 was lucky" It was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on September 12, 1970 using a four-stage Proton-K launch vehicle and received the name "Luna-16".

On September 17, it entered a selenocentric orbit with an altitude of 118.6 km in apopulation and 102.6 km in perilocation. The first orbit correction, carried out on September 18, ensured the passage of the spacecraft over the selected landing area with a simultaneous decrease in the altitude of the perilune to 20.8 km. With the help of the second correction on September 19, the periapsis was lowered to 11.86 km.

On September 20, the propulsion system was turned on again, which provided braking and deorbiting of Luna-16. The height above the surface of the Moon at the beginning of deceleration was 13.28 km, and at the time the engine was turned off - 2.45 km. After turning off the engine, the device made a free fall for 43 seconds. At an altitude of 600 m from the surface, the main engine of the station began to work again in the controlled thrust mode in accordance with the selected control program and incoming information from the DA-018 Doppler speed meter and the Vega radio altimeter. At a height of 20 m, the speed of the station was reduced to about 2 m/s. Here the main engine was switched off and further braking was done with the help of low-thrust engines. At an altitude of about 2 m, on command from the Kvant gamma altimeter, they were turned off, and on September 20 at 5:18 GMT, the Luna-16 automatic station made a soft landing on the lunar surface in the area of the Sea of Plenty, at a point with coordinates 0°41"S 56°18"E e. The deviation from the calculated landing point was 1.5 km.

After landing, the position of the station on the lunar surface was determined, and attempts were made to obtain images of the drilling site using telephotometers. There were three inclusions of telephotometers in total. Due to insufficient illumination, images of the drilling site were not obtained. The two images showed the Earth as a bright spot.

Then, on command from the Earth, the soil-taking device was turned on, and operations began to take the pound, including drilling the pound to a depth of 35 cm, and without turning in azimuth. The pound samples taken were placed in a return rocket container and sealed.

The launch of a return rocket from the surface of the Moon with samples of lunar soil took place on September 21. The duration of the return flight was 84 hours. With a decrease in vertical speed to 250 m/s at an altitude of 14.5 km, the parachute system was put into operation, and on September 24, 1970, the descent vehicle made a soft landing 80 km southeast of Dzhezkazgan.

The main result of the Luna-16 flight was the world's first delivery of samples of the lunar pound to Earth by an automatic vehicle. The total mass of the pound column delivered by Luna 16 was 101 g.

After opening the capsule at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry of the USSR Academy of Sciences, it turned out that the drill was filled with loose lunar soil - regolith, which is an uneven-grained dark gray (blackish) powder that is easily molded and sticks together into separate loose lumps. This feature significantly distinguishes soil (regolith) from structureless terrestrial dust; in this property, it resembles wet sand or the lumpy structure of terrestrial soils.

It was necessary to consolidate success, but the lunar tracks again demonstrated how imperfect the space technology created by people is.

Automatic station "E-8-5" No. 407, officially named "Luna-18", was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on September 2, 1971. On the route of the flight to the Moon on September 4 and 6, trajectory corrections were performed.

When approaching the Moon on September 7, 1971, Luna-18 entered the orbit of an artificial satellite of the Moon. However, due to a methodological error, the braking propulsion system turned on 15 seconds earlier than the calculated time, as a result of which the parameters of the circumlunar orbit after the first deceleration differed greatly from the calculated ones.

To ensure the landing of the station in the calculated area of the Moon, two corrections had to be carried out, and after the second correction, the orbital height in the perilune was to be 16–17 km. In order to save fuel, it was decided to limit ourselves to one orbit correction, which was carried out outside the radio visibility zone. The situation was complicated by the fact that as a result of turning on the engine, instead of the estimated heights of 16.9 km and 123.9 km, 93.4 km and 180.3 km were actually obtained. In order to correct the trajectory in the radio visibility zone, an additional correction was carried out

On September 11, 1971, the deorbit propulsion system was turned on. However, as a result of the abnormal operation of the stabilization engine, an overrun of fuel was obtained, and the station fell to the moon.

Despite the failure of the next mission, on February 14, 1972, the automatic station "Luna-20" ("E-8-5" No. 408) was launched. On February 18, it was transferred to a circular selenocentric orbit, and on August 19, to an elliptical orbit with a maximum height above the surface of the Moon of 100 km and a minimum height of 21 km.

On February 21, the automatic station "Luna-20" made a soft landing at the point with coordinates 3°32"N 56°33"E. on the site of the lunar mainland adjacent to the northeastern tip of the Sea of Plenty.

After landing, the position of the station on the lunar surface was determined, and with the help of telephotometers, images of the lunar surface were obtained, according to which scientists on Earth chose the place to take samples of lunar rock. On command, the pound pick-up device was turned on, and operations began to take the pound. In the process of taking the pound, the current circuit breaker tripped twice, drilling was suspended, and it was resumed again on commands from the Earth.

The samples taken were placed in a return rocket container and sealed. After the end of the soil transfer to the salvage vehicle, the image of the place where samples of the pound were taken was re-obtained using a telephotometer.

The launch of a return rocket from the surface of the Moon with samples of lunar soil took place on February 23, and already on February 25, 1971, the rescue vehicle landed 40 km northwest of Dzhezkazgan.

The main result of the Luna-20 flight was the delivery to Earth of lunar soil samples weighing 55 g. This new lunar soil sample was a loose inequigranular material of a light gray color, much lighter than regolith from the Sea of Plenty. The lighter shade of Luna 20's regolith was confirmed by fixing the reflectivity of the landing site.

The next device from the same series, Luna-23 (E-8-5M No. 410), was launched on October 28, 1974, and on November 2, 1974 it entered the orbit of an artificial satellite of the Moon, close to the calculated one.

The new station was slightly different from its predecessors. In particular, the water filling of the system for ensuring the thermal regime of the instrument compartment was reduced by a factor of three and the Kvant low-altitude altimeter was removed. The main difference was the replacement of the soil intake device. The new LB09 drilling soil-taking device consisted of a drill head, a drill rod with a column and a soil intake mechanism, a drill head feed mechanism, a core reloading mechanism and a container for core placement. In the process of drilling, the soil entered the internal cavity of the rod, where a flexible tube was located - a soil carrier - and a mechanism that picks up the soil and holds it in the form of a column throughout the entire drilling process. At the end of drilling, the soil carrier with soil was removed from the internal cavity of the rod and wound onto a drum placed in a special container. Then this container was placed in a pressurized capsule of the salvage vehicle of the return rocket. The maximum drilling depth was 2.3 m.

In connection with the rigid installation of the soil intake device on the body of the landing stage, telephotometers and lamps were excluded from the equipment.

The design of the return rocket and the salvage vehicle remained unchanged, with the exception of a pressurized capsule for placing soil, whose diameter was increased from 68 to 100 mm.

On November 6, 1974, at the specified time, the propulsion system was turned on for the deorbiting of Luna-23. The first stage of braking was normal and ended at an altitude of 2280 m. After the engine was turned off, the Doppler speed meter "DA-018" was turned on, which provided speed and range measurements at the stage of precision braking. However, when switching to the second measurement range was supposed to occur at an altitude of 400–600 m, this did not happen. As a result, from a height of 130 m, the flight altitude measurement was stopped. The automatic station "Luna-23" landed on the surface of the Moon on the western edge of the Ocean of Storms, west of the Reiner and Mari craters, at a point with coordinates 12° 4° N. sh. 62 ° 17 "E. At the same time, the vertical speed at the time of landing more than doubled the permissible one: 11 m / s instead of 5 m / s, and the landing itself was made on a site with an inclination angle of 10-15 °. At speed and overloads , twice exceeding the allowable ones, at the time of landing the device overturned on the soil intake device, which led to its breakdown, depressurization of the instrument compartment and failure of the decimeter transmitter.

An attempt was made on commands from the Earth to turn on the soil intake device and prepare the return rocket for launch from the surface of the Moon, but to no avail.

Another failure did not embarrass the designers - they are used to failures. Automatic station "Luna-24" ("E-8-5M" No. 413) was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on August 9, 1976. On August 14, the station was braked, as a result of which it switched to a circular selenocentric orbit.

On August 18, at the specified time, the landing platform engine was turned on and after 6 minutes Luna-24 made a soft landing in the southeastern region of the Sea of Crisis, at a point with coordinates 12°45" N 62°12" E. d.

15 minutes after checking the state of the onboard systems of the station, determining its position on the lunar surface, the soil-taking device was turned on by a command from the Earth. The total drilling depth was 225 cm. Due to the fact that it was carried out with an inclination, the total penetration was about 2 m.

The return rocket of the Luna-24 station with samples of lunar soil launched to the Earth on August 19, and already on August 22, 1976, the rescue vehicle landed 200 km southeast of Surgut.

"Luna-24" delivered to Earth samples of lunar soil weighing 170 g, while the nominal immersion of the drill column into the soil corresponded to 225 cm, and the actual length of the column was about 160 cm.

Thus, samples of lunar soil were brought to Earth from the Sea of Plenty ("Luna-16"), from its ancient continental frame ("Luna-20") and from the Sea of Crises ("Luna-24").

Despite the failures and the loss of stations, the soil from the Moon, delivered with the help of machine guns, added arguments to those who argued that manned flights to the Moon are not needed, they are much more expensive than sending vehicles, and the effectiveness is about the same. However, the designers from Babakin's bureau did not limit themselves to soil samples.

In which he talks about the daily life of Russian cosmonauts, and how he prepares for his first flight. Among other things, he told how during a business trip to the United States he visited the Lunar Samples Laboratory - the place where the lunar soil mined during the Apollo program is stored. The topic of lunar soil often comes up in discussions of the lunar program. Some have the misconception that all the soil is gone or that all samples are classified and are not shown to anyone. Sergei's photo report demonstrates that this is precisely a delusion.
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Lunar Samples Laboratory