This Week in Rocket History: Luna 16

IMAGE: Map showing the landing sites of the Surveyor, Apollo and Luna missions. CREDIT: NASA

This week in rocket history: the first successful robotic sample return from the Moon, Luna 16. But first, some background.

The Soviet Union made several attempts starting in 1969 to return samples from the Moon with robotic spacecraft as part of their wider Luna program, which included flybys, impactors, and lunar rovers. Most of the first five attempts at sample return failed and were either not acknowledged by the Soviets or given really generic code names like “Kosmos 300” to hide their true purpose. However, one of them, Luna 15, almost made it.

Luna 15 was the second attempt by the Soviets to do a sample return, and it launched on July 13, 1969, and successfully burned for the Moon. It was in lunar orbit at the same time as the crewed Apollo 11 mission and even attempted to land the day after Neil and Buzz. Unfortunately, it crashed on the surface of the Moon some 553 kilometers (that’s 344 miles) northwest of where Apollo 11 landed. That’s a little more than the distance between Houston and New Orleans in the U.S.

The next attempt, Luna 16, was the sixth attempt by the Soviets to conduct a fully autonomous sample return mission from the moon.

Luna 16 was launched on a Proton K- Blok D rocket from Baikonur on September 12, 1970. The spacecraft weighed a massive 5,750 kilograms at launch. Most of that mass was propellant for its lunar descent stage.

IMAGE: Copy of Russian photo of Luna 16 core after initial dissection. CREDIT: NASA via LPI

Scientific analysis of the Luna 16 regolith samples demonstrated that these soils were different from many of the other samples thus far collected on the Moon and suggested a far more complicated geologic history for our only natural satellite. Although the rocks collected were basaltic, which is a common volcanic rock type on both the Earth and the Moon, these rocks contained iron-rich pyroxene. The higher iron content showed that these rocks originated from a different volcanic process than the Apollo samples that had been collected at that time.

In fact, high iron content is often an indication of longer-term volcanic processes than had been previously known to have happened on the Moon. The volcanic rocks in the regolith were also ancient, with radioisotope ages of around 3.4 billion years. For reference, the first bacterial life is thought to have originated on the Earth around that time. This kind of iron-rich basalt shows that volcanic systems on the Moon lasted for long periods of time, rather than short melting and eruption events as had been previously thought.

So there you have it: the Soviets didn’t crash their spacecraft into a mountain and brought back evidence of ancient lunar volcanism.

More Information

PDF: Beyond Earth: A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration, 1958–2016 (NASA)

PDF: Luna 16 Core (LPI)

Precambrian Time (National Geographic)