posted 03-17-2010 12:19 PM               

The way the paint is peeling off the body of the rover in the picture and the fact that the body of the Lunokhod seems to be sitting on a support framework above one of the wheels suggests it is a replica rather than a piece of real flight hardware or an engineering test model.

When our replica was shipped to Australia the body of the model was mounted on a similar support frame before being mated to the actual wheel assembly for display. Also, the original Soviet photos of the Lunokhods show them as having shiny metallic bodies, not painted hulls like ours or the one in the photo.

posted 03-17-2010 12:56 PM               

The text on the blog seemed to indicate that this rover had been "found in a container on the courtyard of the Institute for Space Studies," or IKI, among a pile of other containers, of which the contents were unknown.

While reading this I happened to see Misha Ivanov walk by, so I grabbed him and pointed him to the original Russian text. He grabbed Sasha, and they both conversed and shook their heads and then Sasha told me to send him the link and he'd get a real answer as to what this was. A couple of days later, Sasha wrote to tell me that "Lev Zelenyi, Director of IKI, says that they brought these things a month ago from the Exhibition Center of the Russian Academy and now are working on placing them in the IKI Exhibition Center. So situation is not as tragic as one could think and obviously going to the best." And a couple of days later, he forwarded more information from Sasha Zakharov of IKI: "As I know Vystavochnyi center RAN delivered to IKI in the last week some models of spacecraft (including model of Lunokhod) for the IKI exhibition. The IKI workshop is working now to renew these models for the exhibition."