Dva Orla

DVA ORLA

Last Updated: July 28, 2000


 An image of the proposed Russian-US military lunar probe "Dva Orla"

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, very few projects of lunar probes have emerged from Russia. One of the few is "Dva Orla" (two eagles), proposed in 1995.
Dva Orla was to be a large orbiter, built in cooperation between the Russian and the US militaries.
After launch on a Proton from Tyuratam, Dva Orla was to enter orbit around the moon and to release a small target satellite to permit calibration of the main instrument carried by the probe: a powerful laser.
Once the laser was calibrated, the probe was to lower its orbit to 200 km to obtain a photographic map of the lunar surface with a camera and a compositional map with the laser and an X-ray spectrometer.
In fact, the laser was to shoot against the surface and any particle released by the rocks was to be collected by the spectrometer, determining its composition.
The mapping probe was then to be lowered to 40 km to study in detail some fifty scientifically interesting sites.
Since any application of Dva Orla technologies was to be a military one, it is not too sad that this probe was never built.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cotrudnichestvo dlya Budushego: McDonnell Douglas Aerospace brochure (In Russian)

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