How the first interplanetary station "Luna-1" in the history of mankind was turned into an artificial comet and a satellite of the Sun

On January 2, 1959, the Vostok-L launch vehicle launched the first ever automatic interplanetary station (AMS) Luna-1 on a flight path to the Moon.

Inside the station, Soviet engineers placed a magnetometer, a micrometeorite detector, a cosmic ray counter, and Soviet symbols. Also, one kilogram of sodium was placed for an unusual experiment. So what happened to Luna 1? Let's find out.

Rocket launch and assigned tasks for "Luna-1"

So, AMS "Luna-1" January 2, 1959 went to the moon. In order to reach the second space speed, the rocket was additionally equipped with a third stage (the so-called block "E" with the installed engine RD0105), which worked normally, and the device reached this speed for the first time in history.

The main task "Luna-1" consisted in "falling" on the surface of our satellite, but it "missed", and all because the upper stage was in working order a little longer than necessary.

And it was not a malfunction of the equipment (everything worked properly). So, according to the data published on the Roscosmos portal, in the calculations they forgot to take into account the time required for the signal to reach the already decently distant station. And it was this minor error that prevented Luna-1 from reaching the Moon.

But even without this, this station made it possible to make a number of unique measurements, which greatly helped in the further development of the space industry.

So January 3rd at 3:56:20 Moscow time at a distance of 119,500 kilometers from Earth, the very same kilogram of sodium was deliberately blown up on Luna-1, which in fact turned the Soviet station into an artificial comet.

The idea to turn the station into an artificial comet belonged to astronomers I. Shklovsky and V. Kurt. They came up with this sodium trick. As a result, a sodium cloud with a radius of about 50 kilometers was formed around the station.

The first artificial comet in history could even be observed with the naked eye (although in the night sky it was a dim dot in the constellation Virgo). Well, the astronomer M. Gnedyshev.

The next day, namely January 4, 1959 at 06:00 "Luna-1" flew past the moon, being at a distance of about 6,000 km from her.

Approximately eight hours after this event, the weakening signal from the station was captured by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Pasadena, California, USA), which has become yet another independent confirmation of another unique achievement of the Soviet engineering.

The next day, communication with the device was cut off, most likely due to the fact that the batteries installed at the station simply ran out of charge.

And according to calculations, by January 7, "Luna -1" completely got rid of the gravitational influence of both the Earth and the Moon and in fact turned into the first artificial satellite of the Sun in the history of mankind, which some media loudly called "the first artificial solar planet systems ".

But this is not the whole list of the unique achievements of "Luna-1". So it was the Soviet station that first registered the outer radiation belt of the Earth. Also, the unique features of the earth's magnetic sphere were revealed.

It turned out that at a distance of 20,800 km it weakens strongly, and at a distance of 22,000 km it almost doubled in a jump and after that it starts to gradually decrease.

This is how Luna-1 established that the Moon lacks its own magnetic field. Also, for the first time in history, the AMC measured the solar wind, and the apparatus of the apparatus made it possible to detect the presence of ionized gas in interplanetary space.

These are the achievements that the first ever interplanetary station "Luna-1" can boast of.

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