Lunokhod-1

The rover was delivered by the Luna-17 station to the Sea of Rains on 17 November 1970. Its pressurised instrument compartment, shaped as a truncated cone, is covered by a lid carrying a solar array: by day it charged the batteries, at night it closed, and an isotope heat source kept the electronics from freezing at minus 150 degrees. A crew of five in Simferopol drove the rover from television imagery with signal delay. It returned more than twenty thousand images, probed the soil with a penetrometer, and its laser retroreflector is still in use. On display is a ground twin built for control training and testing on the lunar proving ground.