Development
Lunokhod's original primary mission was the survey of sites for later manned landings and lunar bases. It was intended that the spacecraft would provide a radio beacon for precision landings of manned spacecraft. Also, the vehicle was designed to be used by a single cosmonaut to move from the primary LK lander to the back-up LK Landers in case of failure. Instead, it was used for remote exploration of the lunar surface after the successful Apollo manned lunar landings.
In mid-1968, at the KIP-10 or NIP-10 (КИП-10 or НИП-10) in the secret village Shkolnoye (ru:Школьное (Крым)), near Simferopol, a lunodrom (moondrome) was built. It covered an area of one hectare (120 meters by 70 meters) and was very similar to some parts of the lunar surface. It was constructed using more than 3,000 cubic meters of soil, and included 54 craters up to 16 m in diameter and around about 160 rocks of various sizes. The whole area was surrounded with bricks, painted in gray and black. It was used to analyze problems with the Lunokhod chassis.
At least four complete vehicles were constructed, with the serial numbers 201, 203, 204 and 205.
Read more about this topic: Lunokhod Programme
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“To be sure, we have inherited abilities, but our development we owe to thousands of influences coming from the world around us from which we appropriate what we can and what is suitable to us.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)