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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Apr 23 2005, 08:50 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
Surveyor 1 was not expected to land. The preflight estimate of success was 25%. After launch, it was found that one of the two omni-antenna arms had not deployed. This was no biggie, but it did shift the center of gravity of the spacecraft. Operation of the descent camera required that the flat-panel high-gain antenna be aimed at earth once the spacecraft was moved to descent orientation. Given the unknown effect of the changed CG, they decided to not do the antenna orientation and the descent imagery was abandoned.
One of my prize posessions is a complete audio tape recording I made of live coverage of the Surveyor 1 landing taped off NBC TV. This was before talking heads took over and there was an absolute prohibition of geek-talk and dead air time. I need to get it off reel-to-reel tape into digital form. Surveyor 2 was lost due to fuel contamination problems. One of the 3 vernier engines failed to thrust during the midcourse maneuver subsequent attempts to fire the engines, and the vehicle was doing a 1 revolution/second spin when it hit the moon. <ouch> On Surveyor 3, the descent camera was removed and the surface mechanical properties arm was installed in it's place, using the same electronics support equipment <I think> as the descent camera. I have *** SOMEWHERE *** a pair of color images I made with photoshop from paper copy published images Surveyor 3 took of a solar eclipse by the earth <total lunar eclipse> NASA published a really lousy version of the worst of the two images during the mission. You can see a beaded lopsided ring of orange fire from sunlight refracting through clear sky between high cloud areas, and a fainter, more continuous blue ring of sky around almost the entire earth. Image resolution was crappy. Earth was visible only near the edge of the wide angle frames, and not in the narrow angle position of the zoom lens. (1 camera with a 2 position zoom lens) Earth was visible at all only because Surveyor landed in the crater at a considerable tilt. Surveyor 7 got a nice series of black and white earth views at 1 day intervals and a quasi-movie of about 10-12 frames of earth rotating over 1 day. (Surveyor 6 and 7 substituted polarizing filters for red/green/blue filters but the science value turned out to be minimal.) Phil: It's wonderful beyond belief to see you working on the Surveyor panoramas. I'd lost all hope of seeing them done right. Surveyor Stereo: Surveyor's 8 throuigh 14, the science missions, were <I think> intended to have dual cameras for stereo. They were never built and flown because of budget cuts and with program delays, Apollo was about to happen. Surveyor 6 got stereo images <with some sun movement between image sets> because the spacecraft was launched from the moon in a 6-foot high and sideways bunnyhop <not as tall as the top of the antenna/solar-panel mast!> Surveyor 7 had a mirror mounted on the mast that provided stereo coverage of part of the soil mechanics arm working area. |
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