Zond Program

Zond (Зонд; “probe” in Russian) is the name of a series of Soviet automatic vehicles designed as test systems with a view to a future moon landing and launches in service between 1963 and 1970. The series began with the takeoff of the first Zond spacecraft for the study of Mars and Venus passing through the vicinity of the Moon.

Objectives

Zond's chart.

From the 4th to the 8th mission were tests for manned circumlunar flights. The Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft was also tested to be used in the mission to the Moon. All were launched using the Proton rocket which was powerful enough to send the Zond on a free return trajectory without entering lunar orbit. The Soviet mission had the capacity to carry 1 or 2 cosmonauts.

For her part, Laura Cortéz Robayo points out that the Ranger 6 and Ranger 7 were launched in 1964 by the Americans, and a year later, in 1965, the Ranger 8, Luna 9 and Zond 3 were launched, who photographed an area of about five million square kilometers of the lunar face not visible from Earth, which gave a complete image of such a hemisphere of the natural satellite.

In the beginning there were problems with the new Proton and the Soyuz spacecraft but they were solved on the fly. The circular drone flight of Zond 5 in September 1968 caused NASA to speed up their efforts and launch Apollo 8 to fly to the moon in December 1968. This is because the CIA believed that Russia was preparing for a flight manned to the satellite. Ultimately 4 of the 5 Zond missions had in-flight failures that could have killed the crew.

The experiments yielded a lot of information such as micrometeor flows, solar and cosmic radiation, magnetic fields, radio emissions, and the solar wind.

Missions