2023-09-12 11:36:36
Nave espacial Luna 2 – RIA NEWS ARCHIVE / CC BY-SA 3.0
MADRID, 12 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The first human device to reach the surface of the Moon It was the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 probe, launched 64 years ago this September 12 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
This probe, weighing 390 kilos and with a diameter of 0.9 meters, was launched in 1959 aboard a Vostok rocket, destined to crash into the moonsuccessfully achieving it on September 14 east of Mare Imbrium, near the Aristides and Archimedes craters.
It was the first successful lunar mission. Luna 2 had a design similar to Luna 1 – which reached the vicinity of the Moon -, a spherical probe with antennas and parts of the instruments that protruded, informs Wikipedia.
Instrumentation was also similar, including scintillation counters, Geiger counters, magnetometer, Cherenkov detectors, and micrometeorite detectors. It lacked a propulsion system.
In the final leg of its journey, once Luna 2 separated from the upper phase of its rocket, it began transmitting information to Earth using three different transmitters, which allowed confirming its impact on the surface. In order to obtain a visual representation of the ship from Earth during the journey, On September 13, a cloud of vapor was released that expanded to 650 kilometers in diameter, and which could be seen by several observatories.. This vapor cloud acted as an experiment to see how sodium gas would act in a vacuum and zero gravity.
The last stage of the Vostok rocket that accompanied the ship to the Moon did not carry any type of tracking device, so it is not known exactly where it ended up, although it is estimated that it did so around 30 minutes after the ship.
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