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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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Apr 24 2005, 09:37 AM
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Guests |
Yep -- I first ran across that series in 1971 at the science library of UC-Santa Cruz (the basement, in fact). UC-Berkeley has an even more complete set. As a result, I can tell you more about the Rangers and early Mariners than you wanted to know. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell very much about the history of the Surveyors -- for that you have to go back to the several-volume 1968 JPL Technical report series on the program. (Stanford has a copy of that, but UCSC doesn't -- I don't know whether Berkeley does or not.)
Next time I'm at the Sacramento State U. library I'll take another look at that Aviation Week article -- come to think of it, I may have a photocopy of that page here. One thing I know virtually nothing about is the Block 3 Surveyor concept, although I can show you an article from a 1961 Aviation Week on design work for both a little 6-legged walking rover that could have been released from Surveyor and a tiny sample-return vehicle that Surveyor could have used to rocket a 1-pound lunar sample back to Earth. (Had we actually been focused on scientific lunar exploration instead of making monkeys out of the Soviets, we could have returned our first sample of the Moon in 1967.) I did stumble once across a brief reference in one NASA microfiche (God knows where) to a reference to the the "planned camera system" for the Block 3 Surveyors, which was a high-resolution facsimile camera on a telescoping mast that would stick up as much as a dozen feet above the spacecraft -- thus allowing it to get both stereo and longer-range landscape views. But this camera would have been located on the main lander. |
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