Mission Summary
Luna 11 was sent to take the first photographs of the Moon from lunar orbit, but a control fault left it pointing the wrong way, and its cameras returned only pictures of empty space. Launched August 24, 1966, just two weeks after the first U.S. Lunar Orbiter, it carried a camera package adapted from the Zond 3 flyby in place of the lander capsule used on earlier Luna missions.
The probe reached lunar orbit on August 27 and prepared for its imaging session. But the spacecraft held an off-nominal attitude, and the cameras, fixed in the direction of the main engine, recorded 64 frames of blank sky instead of the surface. Investigators concluded that a stray object had probably lodged in the nozzle of one of the attitude-control thrusters.
The remaining instruments worked, gathering data on radiation and on the gravitational anomalies, later called mascons, that Luna 10 had also detected. The flight additionally tested gear transmission in vacuum for the future Lunokhod rover, which ran successfully for five hours. The mission ended on October 1, 1966 when the power supply ran down.
Sources and notes can be found on the Sources page.
