NASA’s LRO: Shedding New Light on Old Mysteries

Posted on March 28, 2012 by asteitel

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter keeps finding interesting things on the moon. Last week, LRO’s camera photographed the landing sites of Luna 23 and 24, two Soviet probes that landed in the 1970s. The images have enabled scientists to solve mysteries about these missions, specifically what happened to Luna 23 and why the samples returned by Luna 24 were drastically different than anticipated. It seems these nearly 40-year-old missions are still unfolding. Read the full article on Motherboard. (Left, the Soviet Luna 16 spacecraft. One of many in the long-lasting program.)

This entry was posted in History of Space Science, Soviet, Unmanned Spaceflight and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to NASA’s LRO: Shedding New Light on Old Mysteries

  1. Graham says:
    March 31, 2012 at 08:12

    Hi,

    I noticed in your Motherboard article the line “Luna 9 and 13 have yet to be imaged by NASA’s LRO. It’s yet to be seen if it was actually pesky Moon aliens that wrecked their mission…”

    Luna 9 & 13 were sucessful landers, Luna 9 was the cause of an international incident when Jodrell Bank intercepted the signals carrying the first lunar surface photographs and had them published in a local paper, before the Russians had even had a look at them.

    Reply
    • asteitel says:
      March 31, 2012 at 08:26

      Graham – My editor actually added in the line about Moon aliens. Thanks for bringing up Luna 9′s story; that’s definitely one to look into more. The history of the early Soviet exploration of the Moon is fascinating and peppered with great stories!

      Reply

  2. Pingback: Episode 130 | Old Lander On The Moon | Science... sort of

Leave a Reply