Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started March, 2016. These files are currently not publicly accessible.
Properties of this collection.
It has been several years since the last time we did this.
For this collection, several things were done:
1. Turned off duplicate detection. This collection will be complete, as there is a
good chance we will share the data, and sharing data with pointers to random
other collections, is a complex problem.
2. For the first time, did all the different wikis. The original runs were just against the
enwiki. This one, the seed list was built from all 865 collections.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20160316071327/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zond_program
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations.(February 2013)
Zond (Зонд; Russian for "probe") was the name given to two distinct series of Sovietunmanned space program undertaken from 1964 to 1970. The first series based on 3MV planetary probe was intended to gather information about nearby planets. The second series of test spacecraft being a precursor to manned circumlunar loop flights used a stripped-down variant of Soyuz spacecraft, consisting of the service and descent modules, but lacking the orbital module.
The first three missions were based on the model 3MV planetary probe, intended to explore Venus and Mars. After two failures, Zond 3 was sent on a test mission, becoming the second spacecraft to photograph the far side of the Moon. It then continued out to the orbit of Mars in order to test telemetry and spacecraft systems.
The missions 4 through 8 were test flights under for the Soviet Moonshot during the Moon race. The Soyuz 7K-L1 (also mentioned just as L1) spacecraft was used for the Moon-aimed missions, stripped down to make it possible to launch around the Moon from the Earth. They were launched on the Proton rocket which was just powerful enough to send the Zond on a free return trajectory around the Moon without going into lunar orbit (the type path that Apollo 13 flew in its emergency abort). With minor modification, Zond was capable of carrying two cosmonauts.
In the beginning there were serious reliability problems with both the new Proton rocket and the similarly new Soyuz spacecraft, but the test flights pressed ahead with some glitches. The majority of test flights from 1967–1970 (Zond 4 to Zond 8) showed problems during re-entry.
The Zond spacecraft made only unmanned automatic flights. Four of these suffered malfunctions that would have injured or killed any crew. Instrumentation flown on these missions gathered data on micrometeor flux, solar and cosmic rays, magnetic fields, radio emissions, and solar wind. Many photographs were taken and biological payloads were also flown.
Study of remote regions of circumterrestrial space, development of new on-board systems and units of space stations.
Returned to Earth 7 March 1968—Self destruct system automatically blew up the capsule at 10 to 15 km altitude, 180–200 km off the African coast at Guinea.
A biological payload of two Russian tortoises, wine flies, meal worms, plants, seeds, bacteria, and other living matter was included in the flight, and were the first Earth lifeforms to travel around the moon and return safely.
The first spacecraft to circle the Moon and return to land on Earth.
