Abstract
The successful soft landing on the moon of the Russian spacecraft Luna 9 and the subsequent transmission of photographic panoramic scans of its environment provided the first opportunity for examining structure on the lunar surface down to a few millimeters in size. A novel and interesting feature of the photographs is the large number of small boulders lying clearly visible on the surface. An analysis of the distribution in size of these boulders provides the substance for this letter. A detailed description of the Luna 9 mission has been released by the USSR Academy of Sciences [1966], denoted hereafter as U, which includes a determination of the geometrical relationship of the spacecraft to its surroundings obtained from stereoscopic pairs of images. The measurement of distance in the present analysis is based on the simpler approach of matching to a model calculation the image of the horizon in the third panorama, photographed at a sun angle of ∼27° and transmitted at 1600 UT on February 5, 1966. Ranging derived in this manner compares closely with that in U, and 109 boulders from 2-24 cm in a linear dimension have been measured. A histogram of their size distribution appears in Figure 1.
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