Various off-the-shelf hardware and scientific instruments apparently helped greatly speed up the development process. The spacecraft was also equipped with a radio system to measure parameters of its lunar orbit with high precision. ( 773)Īt the top of the E6 carrier vehicle, the lunar lander was replaced with a satellite of the Moon, which featured a newly designed compartment for scientific instruments. Once there, an engine firing would reduce the probe's velocity from 2.5 to 1.76 kilometers per second so that gravitational pull of the Moon could capture the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit.
Instead of targeting a landing point on the Moon, the E6-S vehicle was programmed to navigate toward an imaginary target point in space located around 1,000 kilometers above the Moon. The proposed lunar orbiter received a designation E6-S, where "S" stood for "sputnik" or satellite.īabakin's team at GSMZ Lavochkin quickly re-designed the existing lunar landing mission profile to reach orbit around the Moon. The carrier for the first Soviet lunar orbiter was largely borrowed from the E6 (Ye-6) spacecraft, which had been previously used to carry automatic landers to the Moon, including the successful Luna-9. The triumphant first soft-landing of a probe on the Moon on February 3, 1966, gave confidence to a team of engineers led by Georgy Babakin and their political supervisors that the lunar orbiting "first" could be pulled off by the time of the Congress' opening in just two months time at the end of March. As often in the Soviet space program, the first robotic lunar orbiting mission acquired an additional propagandistic value, when it was chosen as a backdrop for the upcoming 23rd Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow, the most important political event in the USSR in several years.
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