Search for the moon on March 8

The biggest greeting card for March 8 is the Moon. In 1971, wanting to congratulate their female colleagues, the operators of Lunokhod-1 drew "8" on the surface of the moon. The path of "Lunokhod-1" is known, and its traces can be found in pictures of NASA LRO satellite. Today, in honor of the holiday, try to find this figure eight.

Last year, this topic has already raised Rumlin , but he did not cope with the search. Although the website of the Laboratory of Comparative Planetology of the GEOKHI RAS contains a large amount of materials on lunar rovers. There is a traffic map and a complete collection of lunar panoramas has been published. Somewhere in the archives are still unpublished several thousand television pictures that helped operators to steer. I hope someday they will lay them out too, although the quality there leaves much to be desired.

In the same place on a site it is possible to find and the eight.

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Although, in fact, this is not it.

Here the size of the “eight” is about 36 meters, and the drivers of the lunar rovers told that the eight was obtained with the help of two turns of the lunar rover around the circumference, and its dimensions were about 4 meters.



Now let's try to find it on LRO satellite frames. But first, let's try to restore the configuration of the tracks, as seen in the panorama.



I got such a squiggle, not much like the number "8".



Now we need to look for her on the moon. LRO has repeatedly shot at the Lunokhod-1 landing site, and once with a record quality of 35 cm per pixel . Therefore, we can take a picture and study the tracks on it.



And there are difficulties. It turns out there are a lot of such "eights". Indeed, in the course of their work, the lunar rover had to turn around several times, for shooting panoramas, for finding a convenient route and for researching the ground. So, if desired, any of these eights can be called congratulatory. But still I want to find the one.

To do this, we need to take into account the work schedule of the Lunokhod-1 operators and the route of the vehicle.

As Vyacheslav Dovgan’s “ Lunar Odyssey of the Russian Cosmonautics ” tells in his book, on March 8, 1971, work began on the program of the fifth lunar day. In the first communication session, from 3 to 4 am on March 8, the solar battery was opened and received telemetry. The movement was scheduled for the end of the day: 23:30. While preparing for work during the day, the male part of the crew came up with the idea to draw a figure of eight and congratulate the women, who also participated in the study of the moon. By 0:13 on March 9, the space greeting card was ready.



Now we know that we need to look for the lunar eight, where the path of "Lunokhod-1" began on the fifth lunar day.

At this point there are as many as two "eight". But only one is very similar to the reconstructed trail of Lunokhod-1.



Unfortunately, the panorama does not show any additional landmarks that would allow more precisely to localize the point of shooting - only small stones, and barely noticeable craters. Maybe there is something on the TV footage, but there is no online access to it.

Shooting the tracks of Lunokhod-1 with higher quality would allow us to see more details, but for now we can only take advantage of the occasion and join in congratulating the drivers of lunar rovers.