Alexander Kemurdzhian

Kemurdzhian was born to Armenian parents He was raised in Baku, which he considered his hometown. In 1940 he enrolled at the Bauman Higher Technical College in Moscow. With the start of the Eastern Front of World War II in 1941, he and other students of the tank department were assigned to repair damaged tanks until the institute was evacuated to Izhevsk. In early 1942 he volunteered to join the Soviet Army. Served in the of the NKVD, he participated in the battles of Kursk, the Dnieper, and the Vistula–Oder Offensive. He rose to the rank of senior lieutenant by the time he was demobilized in 1946. For his services, he was awarded the Order of Courage, Order of the Red Star (1944), Order of the Patriotic War (1945, 1995), Order of the Badge of Honour, and the Medal "For Battle Merit". Due to the disruption caused by the war, Kemurdzhian graduated from the department of tracked vehicles of the Bauman Higher Technical College in 1951, some 11 years after enrolling. ==Career==

In 1951, Kemurdzhian began working at the Leningrad-based All-Union Scientific-Research Institute No. 100 (VNII-100, now known as VNIITransmash), It was the "first successful rover to operate beyond Earth" It weighed and was long and high. It carried cameras, transmitters and scientific instruments. The remote-controlled robot traveled some in 10 months and sent back some 20,000 photos and 200 panoramas. It also completed over 500 lunar soil tests. ==Later years and death==

In May 1986 Kemurdzhian led a team of researchers to develop the robot STR-1 (СТР-1) in response to the Chernobyl disaster. Goal was to support the Chernobyl liquidators to investigate and clean up the area. In Chernobyl he was exposed to excessive radiation and was treated in a Moscow hospital for radiation burns. Kemurdzhian transitioned from institute's deputy director to chief scientific officer in 1991, and retired in 1998. In 2000 he became a founding member of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics (StPB RAC). In November 2000 he was the chief speaker at the 30th anniversary of the Lunokhod meeting held at the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater. His last public appearance took place in mid-January 2003. A few days later he suffered a hip fracture and was hospitalized. He died in Saint Peteresburg on 24 or 25 February, 2003. He was buried at the in St. Petersburg. He was married to a Latvian architect and had a son, Vladimir, who headed a lab at VNIITransmash as of the late 1990s. ==Recognition==

Kemurdzhian is recognized as the "founder of the Russian school of design of planetary rovers." He was a member of The Planetary Society, == See also ==