Luna 24
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Luna 24 was an unmanned space mission of the Luna program, also called Lunik 24. The last of the Luna series of spacecraft, the mission of the Luna 24 probe was the third Soviet mission to retrieve lunar soil samples (the first two missions returning samples were Luna 16 and Luna 20).

The probe landed in the area known as Mare Crisium (Sea of Crisis). The mission successfully returned 170 grams of lunar samples to the Earth on 22 August 1976.

• Launch Date/Time: 1976-08-09 at 15:04:12 UTC
• On-orbit dry mass: 4800 kg

As of 2003 neither the Soviet Union nor the countries of the former Soviet Union have launched any other spacecraft to the Moon, although they did launch several unmanned spacecraft to Venus, Mars and also one to Comet Halley.

Preceded by : Luna 23

Luna program

Followed by : none as of 2003

The original article can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_24.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.