Talk:Luna 3

message: I agree that it makes sense for Yenisey-2 to be merged into this article. ThreeBlindMice 20:12, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There wasn't much information in the Yenisey-2 article that wasn't already here, so I just grabbed what was missing and completed the merge. Hope no one minds. ThreeBlindMice 01:00, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

text: Yes, and both this article and the NASA page have many mistakes.  They are ultimate derived from old Western publications rather than research from Russian sources.  It needs extensive revision. DonPMitchell (talk) 04:54, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: The launch time is wrong (for many space probes!).  Here's what happens.  The RAE table lists the launch time of Luna-3 as "Oct 4.1".  If you convert the one-digit approximage time ".1 days" to four digits of accuracy, you get 02:24 UT.  Wrong.  The actual launch date for Luna-3 was 00:43:39.7 UT (given by Baikonur telemetry specialist and historian, Vladimir Poroshkov).  I'll edit in, but it's likely to get undone someday, because the NASA website is mistaken. DonPMitchell (talk) 07:28, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Launch  time 

message: I think this page is unfairly biased towards the Russian space exploits! AN objective page would include several mentionings of the achievements of FREEDOM.
63.214.229.68 (talk) 22:05, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Russian POV 

message: I can't believe there aren't any pics from this mission on this page. If I have time, I'll go find some. fvincent (talk) 17:25, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree... AnonMoos (talk) 13:33, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

text: I thought there used to be some.  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 23:36, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Where are the pictures? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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message: This might be a much easier way to show how bogus this claim is...
The purpose of this mission was to fly out to lunar distance and take photographs of the Moon.  Now consider a hypothetical where the Moon is an object of very little mass.  It would not alter Luna 3's trajectory in any significant way.  A probe can fly out there, take pictures of this object, and fly back on an essentially unaltered elliptical trajectory.  Because of this hypothetical, the mission's path now becomes a two-body problem, no longer a three-body problem.
So the question becomes this:  In such a hypothetical case, would the mission planners want to have additional thrust made available for their probe so that its mission objectives can be improved?  A delta-v that would assist this mission?
It is clear to me that the answer to this is 'no'.  Adding thrust upon passing the Moon gives no advantage to the mission objectives whatsoever.
Now flip a switch which turns lunar gravity back on, and all this does for the mission planners is complicate their work.  It gives them no advantage.  It produces no "assist".  Lunar gravity, for the case of Luna 3, can be understood as having been a nuisance which complicated their planning calculations.  It was in no way an "assist".  This argument might be the clearest way to illustrate that calling Luna 3 a "gravity assist" mission is an utterly bogus claim.  If the mission planners for Luna 3 had a switch that had the ability to turn lunar gravity off, and it can be clearly seen that this would have made their job much easier, then it is completely improper to say that they used the lunar gravity to assist in achieving their mission objectives.
This stands in stark contrast to bona fide gravity assist missions where the mission could not have been accomplished were it not for this free delta-v infusion.  Or it would have required a significantly bigger rocket at a significantly bigger expense.  The essence of gravity assist is that you are using gravity to assist you.  Whoever concocted this notion that this qualifies as anything that happened with Luna 3 has lots of 'splaining to do.  I myself see absolutely no justification for this claim. -- Tdadamemd19 (talk) 08:35, 14 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Hypothetical situation where lunar gravity can be turned off