Time Machine
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Lunokhod 1
first wheeled rover to operate on another body
November 17, 1970Lavochkin
Petar Milošević / Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, Moscow (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The world that day
3.6 billion
People on Earth
2
Nations to launch a human
4
Humans to walk on the Moon
0
Known worlds beyond the Sun
On 17 November 1970, ramps unfolded from the Luna 17 lander in Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rains, and an eight-wheeled machine rolled down onto the lunar dust. It was Lunokhod 1, the first wheeled vehicle ever to move across the surface of another world, and the strangest spacecraft the Soviet Union had yet flown: a 756-kilogram tub-shaped carriage with a hinged convex lid, television eyes, ramps facing both directions in case boulders blocked one exit, and a crew left behind on Earth.
That crew, five men at a time working in shifts at a Soviet deep-space control center, drove by television, with every command crawling across the void and every picture arriving late. By lunar day, solar cells on the open lid charged the batteries; at sunset the lid closed and a polonium-210 radioisotope heater kept the electronics alive through two-week nights of minus 150 degrees Celsius. Designed to last three lunar days, the rover kept answering Earth's calls for eleven.
By the time operations ceased in the autumn of 1971, Lunokhod 1 had driven 10.54 kilometres, returned more than 20,000 television images and 206 high-resolution panoramas, run 25 chemical analyses of the soil and tested its bearing strength at over 500 points. Then it vanished from precise human knowledge for four decades, until NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed it in March 2010. Weeks later, physicists at Apache Point Observatory fired a laser at the new coordinates, and the rover's French-built retroreflector flashed back, startlingly bright, ready to do science again.
By the numbers
- Luna 17 launch
- 10 Nov 1970, Baikonur
- Lunar landing
- 17 Nov 1970, Mare Imbrium
- Rover mass
- 756 kg
- Distance driven
- 10.54 km
- Images returned
- 20,000+ TV images, 206 panoramas
- Operational life
- 11 lunar days (designed for 3)
Why it mattered
Lunokhod 1 invented planetary teleoperation, the discipline of driving a machine across another world from a control room on this one. Its engineering answers, thermal lids, radioisotope heaters and independently driven wheels, foreshadowed every rover that followed, from Sojourner to Curiosity, Perseverance and China's Yutu. Its rediscovered laser retroreflector still contributes precise measurements of the Earth-Moon distance, making it one of the very few 1970 spacecraft doing active science more than five decades later.
- Earthbound drivers worked in five-man shifts, steering with television pictures that arrived after a multi-second light delay, arguably history's hardest remote-control driving job.
- A polonium-210 radioisotope heater behind the closed solar lid kept the rover alive through lunar nights of minus 150 degrees Celsius.
- Its French-built laser retroreflector was lost for nearly 40 years until LRO images pinpointed the rover in March 2010; the first laser pulses fired at it in April 2010 returned far brighter than expected, and it is still used for lunar ranging.
- Designed for three lunar days of operation, Lunokhod 1 lasted eleven, performing 25 soil chemistry analyses and over 500 soil mechanics tests along the way.
- It beat astronauts to the title of first Moon driver: Apollo 15's crewed lunar rover did not arrive until July 1971, eight months after Lunokhod's first tracks.
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