Ranger, Surveyor, Luna, Luna Orbiter, 1960s Missions to Earth's Moon |
Ranger, Surveyor, Luna, Luna Orbiter, 1960s Missions to Earth's Moon |
Apr 21 2005, 08:07 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2488 Joined: 17-April 05 From: Glasgow, Scotland, UK Member No.: 239 |
Have any of the serious experts on this board ever sorted out any 1960s images? I'm thinking of the Surveyor panoramas (in the 60s they did it with photos pasted onto the inside of half-spheres!) and the way that the exposure dropped off toward one corner, making a horrible patchwork effect. Or them lines and spots on the Lunar Orbiter images...
Most of the NASA mission data should be available as digital source material, and thus could be manipulated, though I suspect that getting anything 'real' from Soviet missions would be a bit of a chase! Any thoughts? -------------------- Remember: Time Flies like the wind - but Fruit Flies like bananas!
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Nov 9 2006, 12:03 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
There were two reasons why the Ranger series was abandoned after they finally got the Block 3 version to work:
1) Lunar Orbiter and Surveyor were in the works and designed to provide orders of magnitude more data than the Block 4 and Block 5 Rangers could ever provide. It seemed a waste of money to continue to pour it into Ranger when much more capable spacecraft were about to come online. 2) Ranger had a very limited view at high resolutions. The way in which field of view decreased as resolution increased limited the ability to understand fine-scale structures in context with their surroundings. The three Rangers which returned imagery served their designed function of imaging the lunar surface at very high resolution and determining some of its basic properties (slope, cratering, etc.). But additional Rangers would have given very little more data and wouldn't have been all that helpful in studying the Moon. -the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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