Luna 24
The last Moon sample for 44 years: a long core from the Sea of Crises.
Key facts
- Agency
- Soviet Union
- Type of mission
- Robotic sample return
- Target
- The Moon: Mare Crisium
- Launched
- 9 August 1976
- Samples returned
- 170 g, a drill core about 1.6 m long
- Status
- Completed 1976
Luna 24 landed on 18 August 1976 in Mare Crisium, the Sea of Crises, a round lava plain on the Moon's eastern edge. Its drill reached about 2 metres down and brought up a continuous core of soil about 1.6 metres long, coiled into a flexible tube inside the return capsule.
The capsule landed in Siberia on 22 August 1976 with 170 grams of material. No more samples would come back from the Moon until China's Chang'e 5 in 2020.
What the core showed
Because it was a core, Luna 24 preserved the soil in layers, like a book whose oldest pages are at the bottom. The basalt fragments in it are very low in titanium, a new kind of mare lava at the time. Its layers record how the lunar surface is slowly churned by micrometeorites, the dust-sized particles that strike the airless Moon all the time.
Why it matters to meteorites
Lunar meteorites made of very-low-titanium basalt can be compared directly with Luna 24. The three Luna missions together returned only about 326 grams, but they came from three sites that Apollo never visited, filling gaps on the map of the near side.
Key dates
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 9 August 1976 | Luna 24 launched. |
| 18 August 1976 | Landed in Mare Crisium and drilled about 2 m deep. |
| 22 August 1976 | The capsule landed in Siberia with 170 g of core. |
See where this mission fits among all the others in the mission timeline.
Did you know?
Luna 24 was the last spacecraft of any nation to land on the Moon until China's Chang'e 3 in 2013.
Its 1.6 m core was kept in its original layer order, so scientists could study how the soil changes with depth.