UMSF space history photo of the month Options

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Maybe we could make this a monthly item, in which we could look back at the history of Unmanned Space missions.
For January 2008 I've chosen an image showing the coverage of the Sun by early Pioneer 5-8 spacecraft.
Pioneer 5 to 8, or Pioneer V to VIII using the system of Roman numerals in vogue during the early 1960s for spacecraft designations, were directed towards the Sun along the earth's orbit to monitor solar activity. Pioneer V was launched on 11th March 1960 and provided the very first space weather report 4 to 8 hours before a solar storm hit the Earth.
Some of this Pioneer quartet, Pioneer 6-7-8 even provided updates on our Sun's activity during the early Apollo Moon landings in order to check the damaging potential of solar flares to affect the astronauts.

[Phil Stooke]

The Surveyor bacterium story is not generaly accepted today. The people who did the work reported that they probably contaminated it. I think one of them wrote in to the Planetary Report about it years ago.

Surveyor descended on its little 'vernier' thrusters, after braking on a big rocket module mounted under the frame. The rocket and tankage were dropped as the verniers came on, and must lie near each landing site. None were seen in Surveyor images, or by the Apollo 12 crew. But if a Google Lunar X Prize rover were to visit a Surveyor site it might have a chance to search for it.

Phil

[dvandorn]

Surveyor descended on its little 'vernier' thrusters, after braking on a big rocket module mounted under the frame. The rocket and tankage were dropped as the verniers came on, and must lie near each landing site. None were seen in Surveyor images, or by the Apollo 12 crew. But if a Google Lunar X Prize rover were to visit a Surveyor site it might have a chance to search for it.

As highly as I regard your work, Phil, this statement is a teeny-tiny bit misleading. Surveyor's main descent engine was a solid rocket motor; it consisted of little more than a basketball-sized sphere, which held the solid fuel, and a nozzle. After burnout, which occurred about a km over the surface and at a speed of about 100 mph, Surveyor free-fell for a few seconds and then the verniers started up, at which point the descent motor was dropped. The combination of the vernier ignition and descent motor jettison gave maximum separation velocity between lander and motor.

I guess I just would never consider the sphere that held the solid fuel "tankage," just as I would never consider the length of a Shuttle SRB a tank. With solid fuel motors, the device that holds the fuel is more often called a casing than a tank...

I'd change the statement to "the burned-out descent motor casing and its nozzle were dropped," with this kind of technology.

I also have to correct another possible mis-speak -- Philco says "Surveyor 1 made the first soft landing on the Moon in June 1966." In point of fact, it made the first lunar soft landing in the Surveyor program. The first "soft" landing (in which an instrument package survived and sent back images and data from the surface) was, of course, made by Luna 9 several months prior to Surveyor 1's achievement.

-the other Doug