Moon mission question

[just_curious]

When the manned Apollo missions orbited the moon before landing, did the always use the same orbit or did they orbit in different paths?

 

[vogon13]

IIRC all but one mission was pretty much in an equatorial orbit, and one inclined somewhat to that. Chances of me finding reference = zilch. One or two Apollo missions placed 'sub'satellites in orbit, and they impacted surface pretty quick (<90 days). One of the Lunur Orbiter photographic mapping sats was put in a near polar orbit. IIRC all the Soviet landers came down pretty close to each other due to it simplifying descent procedures. Curious what kind of path that Zond craft took, the one that returned to earth. Think it had some turtles on board, or plant samples, no cosmonaut though. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#ff0000"><strong>TPTB went to Dallas and all I got was Plucked !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#339966"><strong>So many people, so few recipes !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#0000ff"><strong>Let's clean up this stinkhole !!</strong></font> </p> </div>

 

[drwayne]

You might find this intersting:<br /><br />http://yarchive.net/space/orbits/lunar_orbit.html<br /><br />Wayne<br /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>"1) Give no quarter; 2) Take no prisoners; 3) Sink everything."  Admiral Jackie Fisher</p> </div>

 

[alokmohan]

So it was very near the same orbit,it seems

 

[CalliArcale]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>The Zond was essentially a Soyuz. It could have carried a man.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />Actually, it was about two-thirds of a Soyuz. The orbital module was deleted to save payload mass, which permitted a Proton rocket (UR-500) to send it on a lunar flyby trajectory. Zond did not, however, orbit the moon. It just looped around the back and came right back to Earth afterwards.<br /><br />The Soviets actually had two completely distinct and openly hostile development lines going on their moon program, which may explain why it ultimately failed. One, ultimately the most mature but never capable of lunar landing and safe return, came to be known as Zond. This was a stripped-down Soyuz sent to loop around the back of the Moon using Chelomei's new UR-500 rocket (now known as Proton). A later, larger UR-500 using clustered stages was proposed to send a full-scale Soyuz to the Moon to orbit it. I'm not sure what the lander plans were for this proposal, but I *think* it was a Moon-direct program. (Apollo was lunar-orbit-rendezvous, or LOR.)<br /><br />Zond did get to fly around the backside of the moon. There were plans to send a manned mission around the back of the moon, but this was cancelled for two main reasons. 1) They had difficulty getting the complicated return to work; a Soyuz heatshield is severely inadequate for lunar return, so they planned to do a "double-skip" reentry, skipping off the atmosphere twice to bleed off energy before making the real entry. They did get it to work at least once and possibly twice, if memory serves, but several other Zonds were destroyed on reentry. 2) In the end, after all the political bickering had ended and the dust had settled, it was decided to let Chelomei's UR-500 do a lunar mission that just looped around the Moon, and the Korolev's N-1 could do the real thing. When the Apollo program proved successful much faster, there was no longer much point in a Zond <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>