Luna 1, the first escapee from Earth.

On this day in 1959, the Soviet Union launched a 4-foot-diameter metal ball — a close copy of the Sputnik satellite that had kicked off the space age two years earlier — in the direction of the moon. On January 4 Luna 1, also known as “Mechta” or Dream,  passed within 6,000 kilometers of the lunar surface. The Soviets had meant for it to hit the moon, and had loaded commemorative “pennants” on board that were supposed to scatter in every direction at the moment of impact. But a faulty rocket burn caused the probe to miss its target. Fifty-three years later, Luna 1, the first object to escape Earth’s gravity, is still in orbit around the sun.

In 1959, such a demonstration of Soviet rocket power didn’t sit well with American notions of technological superiority, and there was much fretting in the Western press. LIFE magazine editorialized about “The Warning of Mechta,” and pointed fingers at the politicians and bureaucrats. One writer named Lloyd Mallan took it a step further, claiming, in an article titled “The Big Red Lie,” published in the April 11, 1959 issue of True magazine, that the Soviets had made up the whole story about Luna 1.

After a long fact-finding trip (“14,000 miles behind the Iron Curtain”), Mallan concluded not only that “Lunik [the somewhat derisive nickname used in some American reports] does not exist and never did” but that “the Russians do not have any ICBMs,” and that the striking power of the Red Air Force had been greatly exaggerated. Mallan based his conclusions partly on the mistaken idea that no Westerners had heard signals from the Russian moon probe.

In August of that year, a Congressional fact-finding committee alarmed by Mallan’s claims heard different from people who actually knew what they were talking about.  William Pickering, head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told the committee that the Goldstone tracking antenna had detected signals from a spacecraft moving away from the moon on January 4. According to the committee report, “Dr. Pickering said there was no doubt in his mind that the object being tracked was the Soviet Moon rocket.” None of the expert witnesses doubted it, in fact.

During the hearings Mallan’s patriotism even came into question, based on his past involvement with communist-sympathizing groups during the Spanish Civil War. Although the hearings put to rest any serious possibility of Luna 1 being a hoax, Mallan went on to a dubious career debunking (usually erroneously) other Russian space achievements.

As for the Russians, they scored again later that year with Luna 3, the first spacecraft to photograph the far side of the moon. Boris Chertok, a veteran of the cold war space race, wrote in his multi-volume memoir about those early days when his country was briefly ahead of the United States:

You can criticize the utopian plans for building communism, the trampling of human rights, and the Communist Party’s dictatorship in a totalitarian state all you want. But it is impossible to erase from the history of the Khrushchev era the favorable conditions created for developing cosmonautics and its related sciences. Cosmonautics did not arise simply from militarization, and its aims were more than purely propagandistic. During the first post-Sputnik years, the foundations were laid for truly scientific research in space, serving the interest of all humankind. All Soviet people, not just those of us who were directly involved in the missile and space programs, felt proud and were thrilled to be citizens of the country that was blazing the trail for the human race into the cosmos.

Apollo 11 moon rocks. Photo credit: NASA

This recently found moon rock is one of about 200 small fragments presented as gifts to foreign nations, U.S. states and territories. All were sliced from a single Apollo 17 sample, number 70017, and many are unaccounted for today. Various investigations have been pursued over the years to track down these and other missing moon rocks, including Operation Lunar Eclipse, the joint sting operation between NASA, the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Customs that recovered the Goodwill Moon Rock originally given to Honduras.  Another somewhat famous escapade includes the interns at Johnson Space Center who smuggled out a 600 pound safe containing samples from all the Apollo missions (the F.B.I. caught them).

NASA’s Office of the Inspector General keeps tabs on any information surfacing about moon rocks, both to collect missing pieces and to sweep counterfeit rocks off the market. Updates are published in the office’s semi-annual reports — just last year they recovered a Goodwill Moon Rock intended as a gift to Cyprus (pdf), however, “The plaque had been intended for delivery by a U.S. diplomat to the people of Cyprus as a gift when hostilities broke out in that country. The plaque had remained in the custody of the diplomat until his death and was recovered from his son.”

Wikipedia’s moon rocks page collects more stories, such as the ill-fated gift to Ireland: the Apollo 11 rock ended up in a landfill. (Their Apollo 17 rock is safe in a museum, at least.) Clearly, some of these will never be recovered.  But sometimes, every once in a while, you can just open a box.

Photo: Huang Jingwen / Xinhua

What impresses me most about the new photos of the moon taken by the Chinese Chang’e-2 orbiter is not their beauty (although they are pretty) nor their sharpness (NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter returns higher resolution images). It’s the fact that they were unveiled by Premier Wen Jiabao (left).

I can’t think of an occasion where a U.S. head of state showed that much interest in a purely scientific (unmanned) space mission. The closest thing I could find after a quick search is this 1965 shot of Lyndon Johnson being shown photos from the Mariner 4 Mars probe, two weeks after the flyby.

More Chang’e-2 photos are at this Chinese-language page at the China National Space Administration. Here’s a nice one:

If you like this Chang'e 1 image, you'll love Chang'e 2.

China’s ambitions in space are often exaggerated and held up as a threat to U.S. preeminence in the field, mostly as a scare tactic to shake more money for NASA out of Congress. A lot of the huffing and puffing you can safely ignore. But the Chinese have made solid progress over the last decade in both human and robotic spaceflight, and tomorrow will send a second, more sophisticated Chang’e orbiter to the moon, onboard a Long March rocket fired from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

A few improvements over Chang’e-1, which operated from 2007 to 2009: The lunar pictures will be 10 to 20 times sharper, with resolutions down to five meters. The trip to the moon will be more direct, with no transitional parking orbit around Earth. And the data rate will be higher. Basically, it’s the same mission, only better.

Chang’e-2 will be scouting locations for China’s first lander/rover, Chang’e-3, currently scheduled to launch by 2013. After that, the nation has plans for a lunar sample return mission sometime around 2017 or 2018.

Full coverage of the Chang’e-2 launch is at China Central TV.

Update, 7: 45 EST, October 1: Chang’e 2 launched successfully and is headed for the moon.

Apollo 13 Lunar Module contingency checklist. Courtesy of Bonhams New York.

“Well I can’t say that this thing hasn’t been filled with excitement,” said astronaut Jim Lovell as Apollo 13′s crew crowded into the Command Module Odyssey—following the explosion of an onboard tank in the Service Module—and headed back to Earth. CapCom immediately joked, “Well, James, if you can’t take any better care of a spacecraft than that, then we might not give you another one.”

Exactly 40 years after the events of Apollo 13, Bonhams held its annual space history auction. Included in the 290 items auctioned were the flight notes of Jim Lovell and Fred Haise (left), used during their nerve-wracking return to Earth. The notes, which sold for $45,750, include such reminders as “Turn LM up link squelch off” (written in red ink by Lovell), and comments about various circuit breakers (written in black ink by Haise).

Apollo 11 flight plan. Courtesy of Bonhams New York.

The auction also included memorabilia from Apollo 11, such as this flight plan (right), which was signed by Neil Armstrong on August 9, 1969, while the crew was in quarantine after splashdown. The sheet, which sold for $152,000, includes Armstrong’s famous quote: “One small step for a man—one giant leap for mankind.”

The Luna 17 lander, with tracks from the roving Lunokhod 1.

Scientists studying photos from the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have identified the relic Soviet Lunokhod rovers that touched down on the moon in the 1970s. Read the report here.

Planetary scientists at the Vernadsky Institute in Moscow have also been playing with the LRO images. Be sure to click on the amazing Lunokhod panoramas at the bottom of their web page.

Not your ordinary space rock. (NASA image)

In 1982, the idea that a chunk of rock could be hurled from the moon to Earth by a lunar impact was considered pretty far out. For one thing, wouldn’t such a massive, high-energy explosion destroy the evidence by turning the excavated rocks to glass? Besides, meteorites were well known to come from small bodies like asteroids.

On January 18 of that year, a pair of geologists hunting for meteorites on the icy ground in Antarctica’s Allan Hills region came across a greenish-tan sample they tagged as ALHA81005. It was the last stone they found that day before returning to camp—in fact, the last one of 373 specimens collected during the 1981-82 field season.

Back in the lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, scientists immediately recognized the rock as unusual. When a thin section was sent to the Smithsonian’s Brian Mason, an internationally known expert on lunar geochemistry, he commented in a scientific bulletin: “Some of the clasts resemble the anorthositic clasts described from lunar rocks.” Mason, who died last week at the age of 92, was the first to make a connection between a meteorite found on Earth and the samples returned by the Apollo astronauts a decade earlier.

Later analysis confirmed Mason’s suspicion. The types of glass particles in the meteorite matched those in lunar rocks exactly, as did the ratios of iron and manganese. Impact experts even came up with an explanation for how ALHA81005 got here in one piece. It turns out that rocks lying close to the moon’s surface would be spared the worst shock effects in an impact. In fact, the lunar meteorite was no more damaged than other rocks Apollo astronauts had picked off the ground, even though it blasted off the moon at a speed exceeding 1.5 miles per second (lunar escape velocity).

When scientists presented these and other results at a conference more than a year later, “No one in the large crowd even stood to object to the provocative claim,” according to Science magazine. “The psychological barrier to the idea that meteorites can originate on large bodies [including Mars] had been broken.”

• First, a lovely NASA video of an aurora shimmering above Saturn, with commentary by Caltech planetary scientist Andy Ingersoll, who’s been exploring the outer solar system since the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions of the 1970s:

• Next, a Russian team enters the Google Lunar X-Prize race with a rover called Selenokhod. The robot’s much larger ancestor, Lunokhod-3 (below), is now in a museum at NPO Lavochkin, the company that built it back in the 1960s.

• Finally, a fascinating Associated Press story about the long, involved search for the remains of U.S. Navy pilot Scott Speicher, who was shot down during the Gulf War, and whose remains were only recovered last summer.

See? There was a plume (the fan-shaped smudge) after all. (Photo: NASA/ LCROSS Team)

Congratulations and apologies are due. The LCROSS team, who endured much grumbling  from Internet viewers after last month’s crash into the moon failed to produce a big visible plume, is reporting what they say is clear evidence of water in a lunar crater. Not just a thimbleful, either—at least 24 gallons, and probably more, from a crater 20 to 30 meters wide. The spectral signature from two different instruments is “very real,” said a smiling principal investigator Anthony Colaprete.

The results from LCROSS lend credence to the idea that the rest of the hydrogen detected a decade ago at the moon’s poles is water ice, too, according to Greg Delory, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley. Read about the LCROSS results here.

View from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (Photo: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently took this lonely photo of the Surveyor 1 spacecraft sitting on the moon’s surface, exactly where it touched down 43 years ago.

Surveyor 1, in case you’ve forgotten, was the first U.S. spacecraft to make a soft landing on another world, on June 2, 1966. The Soviet Luna 9 mission had done the same thing four months earlier, and had sent back a couple dozen pictures of its surroundings—humanity’s first look at the moon’s surface, after centuries of wondering.

Surveyor, though, was far more sophisticated than Luna 9, and returned 11,000 photos (see the gallery below). Nobody was more surprised at its success than the people who built it. Before launch, the newspapers had been full of stories about Surveyor’s budget problems, delays, and management squabbles between NASA headquarters, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Hughes Aircraft, which built the lander for JPL.

On landing day, none of that mattered. The thing worked perfectly.

Oran Nicks, who headed NASA’s lunar and planetary program at the time, was in the control room at JPL. He later recalled, “I was prepared for the worst as telemetry reports came in.” When the craft touched down, “I could hardly believe it, but then, before long, the first pixels of a TV frame showed the footpad on the surface.”

Among those who had doubted Surveyor’s chances of success was Max Faget, the designer of the Mercury capsule, who at the time was working on the Apollo program at NASA’s Manned Space Center in Houston. Faget had bad-mouthed the JPL robot lander on more than one occasion, and had told an influential Congressman that it wasn’t necessary as a precursor to Apollo’s manned landings. After Surveyor 1 touched down safely, Nicks recalled, “Max called me at NASA Headquarters to congratulate us and to say that he hadn’t believed we could bring off an unmanned landing, especially not on the first try. Though we reveled in Max’s ‘eating crow,’ we respected him greatly and took his words as high praise for our mission’s work.”

In fact, Surveyor 1 showed that the Apollo landings were possible, and that a three-legged lander wouldn’t sink in deep lunar dust, as a few alarmists had feared. The news and the photos got front page play, and it seemed in June 1966 that the Americans had pulled ahead of the Soviets in their race to the moon.

William Pickering, who was then the director of JPL, told an interviewer years later, “I felt the Apollo people should have been more interested in [Surveyor] than they were, but they said ‘Good landing,’ that’s all.”

Everyone knew that Apollo was NASA’s headline act, and that the Surveyor robots (four more landed on the moon between 1966 and 1968) were just bit players. But for a couple of years JPL had the moon to itself, and its engineers couldn’t help feeling smug. Recalled Pickering, “We were strongly tempted to put a sign on Surveyor that said, ‘Follow me,’ but we didn’t ever do it.”

An unsuspecting Cabeus Crater, in LCROSS's crosshairs. (Photo: B.Grieger, B.H. Foing & ESA/SMART-1/ AMIE team)

Friendly warning: Do not be in the moon’s Cabeus Crater tomorrow morning. At 7:31 eastern time, a giant, two-and-a-half ton empty rocket stage will come crashing down from the sky at 1.5 miles a second. Four minutes later, another, smaller spacecraft will hit near the same spot.

What the…? Ahh, it’s just NASA scientists looking for water again.

The Lunar CRater and Observation Satellite (LCROSS) and its Centaur rocket stage will smash into the moon so scientists can inspect the material that flies up for the spectral signature of water. Some 350 tons of debris from the Centaur impact is expected to rise miles above the lunar surface. The smaller LCROSS spacecraft will spend its final minutes flying through the spray, searching for water, before it, too, crashes into the moon. Then a variety of Earth-based telescopes will scrutinize that debris.

A few thoughts about tomorrow’s impact:

• The advertised purpose of the experiment is to settle once and for all whether there’s water ice in permanently shadowed “cold traps” near the lunar poles. How likely is LCROSS to put the matter to rest? After all, the Lunar Prospector spacecraft was sent smashing into a crater very close to Cabeus 10 years ago, for this very purpose, and saw nothing. But that experiment, a last-minute add-on to the main mission, was always given low odds of success. LCROSS was designed from the start to observe an impact with spectrometers that can detect water. The Centaur is a much bigger impactor, coming in at a steeper angle—which means a lot more energy will be delivered to the target, under much better observing conditions. That makes it more likely we’ll see something this time. But hitting the right patch of ice, in the right crater, under the right viewing conditions, is trickier than it sounds. So if LCROSS finds no water, the scientific argument is likely to continue. There will always be another place to look.

• Don’t expect a big, dramatic explosion. Even though NASA has invited the public to watch and report what they see, this is not a viewer-friendly event. The impact happens after sunrise in the eastern U.S.—bad luck, but lighting conditions at the moon were more important. The visible flash will last only a tenth of a second (although the rising plume of debris should appear for half a minute). And you’ll need at least a 10-inch telescope to see anything, even the barest smudge, which rules out all but serious amateur astronomers. “The best place to observe it is online,” says LCROSS project scientist Anthony Colaprete.

• Still, LCROSS is cool, and not just in the SCTV “blow it up real good” sense. The final pictures from the spacecraft as it kamikazes into the moon will be fun to compare to the Ranger photos from the 1960s.

• By the way, here’s what a crash site on the moon looks like. (The picture was just released today from LCROSS’s “parent spacecraft,” the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.)