Forty-five years ago, the Last In the Soviet Moon Program, the Automatic Station – “Luna-24” went to the moon.
Luna-24 was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome on August 9, 1976 at 18 o’clock 4 minutes 12 seconds using the Proton-K carrier rocket. Exit to the trajectory of flight to the moon was carried out using the intermediate near-earth orbit. Almost 9 days, August 18, the station “Luna-24” made a soft landing in the southeastern area of the seas of crises.
The main task of the mission “Luna-24” was a fence of samples of lunar soil. With this task, the automatic station coped – 170 grams of the lunar soil from a depth of 160 cm were delivered to the Earth. Thus, the samples of the lunar soil delivered to the Earth completed a series of samples taken by the previously automatic stations “Luna-16” and “Moon-20”.
Luna-24 station Return rocket with samples of lunar soil started to Earth on August 19 at 8:55 minutes. The duration of the reverse flight was 84 hours. On August 22, it approached the Earth with the second space speed. At the expense time 8 hours before the existence of a saved apparatus, its separation from a return missile occurred to the atmosphere of the Earth.
At an altitude of 15 km, the parachute system was put into operation, and the descent apparatus was landing in 200 km southeast of Surgut. The flight program “Luna-24” was fully completed.
Mission “Luna-24” has become the last before a long break (up to 1990) in the study of the natural satellite of the Earth with space powers, and until the next soft landing of the Chinese apparatus, which brought to the surface of the Earth’s satellite, the lunohod enjoyed, passed as many as 37 years. The next domestic station “Luna-25” will start a new twist of the program of studying the Moon, the purpose of this project is to conduct research in the South Pole area of the Moon.