Luna 16 Soviet Mission 50th Anniversary
Luna 16 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_16) 50th Anniversary - Video by the New Mexico Museum of Space History. -- Drilling rig 380 thousand kilometers from Earth - On September 24, 1970, the return vehicle with lunar soil from the Luna-16 station made a soft landing 80 km southeast of Dzhezkazgan. This was the first time that regolith was brought to Earth by a robot rather than a human. During the Apollo 11 (July 16?24, 1969) and Apollo 12 (November 14?24, 1969) missions, astronauts collected and brought home regolith. The main objective of the Luna-16 program was a practical proof of the possibility of studying other celestial bodies with the help of robots and the delivery of soil samples from their surface. To do this, a drilling rig was installed on the Luna-16 lander, which was able to go deep into the surface of the Moon by 35 cm. The launch required a heavy Proton-K rocket, because Luna-16 weighed 5725 kg, of which 1880 kg was the landing part, 512 kg was the return rocket, and the return vehicle itself was 34 kg. The lunar soil is now stored in the Laboratory of Geochemistry of the Moon and Planets, GEOKHI RAS. Interestingly, there is not only "Soviet" regolith, but also American - after each delivery to Earth, both the USSR and the USA transferred part of the soil to scientists from other countries. Now the soil is stored in a special storage with an inert environment, where the required temperature and humidity are maintained. In total, the institute has about 340 g of regolith from five landing sites - three Soviet and two American (Luna-16, Luna-20, Luna-24, Apollo 14 and Apollo 16) ). 326 g of them are Soviet and 14 are American. In the Cosmonautics and Aviation Center at VDNKh, a mock-up of the return vehicle is exhibited - you can learn about it and other lunar stations on the excursion "To the Moon and Back": https://cosmos-vdnh.timepad.ru/event/2161572 The Soviet Luna 16 was the first robotic probe to land and the Moon and returned a lunar soil sample. This month is the 50th anniversary of Luna 16! The lunar soil sample acquired from Luna 16 had three fragments sold for $855,000 at a private auction in 2018!
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