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.

[edstrick]

The Surveyor images of the crescent (i think) earth with the laser spots were 600 line analog images. The normal data product was slow-scanned directly onto negative film in a data-recording camera.

On rare occassion, the analog data tapes were played back and digitized for quantitative analysis but these weren't. Images were also scan-converted in not-quite-real time for TV display, as during the Surveyor 1 landing TV coverage.

The Laser experiment image clearly showed lines of a raster image with darker gaps between the lines, the laser spots were very sharp brightness increases on a couple lines, extending across what in digital data would be about 3 pixels along the line.

There were more lasers involved in the test than the two in the image, but cloudy conditions at the telescope sites obliterated any chance of them showing up.

[DDAVIS]

I wonder if a carefully pointed 5 watt green laser would be as visible from the Moon as the lasers used then. There are enough such lasers that a letter or symbol could be arranged for the benefit of future lunar telephoto camaras.
It is also just possible, primarily through the strong Lunar 'back scattering', that a determined mass effort could 'illuminate' the Lunar night side using the thousands of existing brighter than 5mw green lasers carefully pointed at the Moon. An early attempt at this using inferior red lasers of several years ago can be read of here:

http://www.afineline.org/projects/paint.html

-Don