Ranger, Surveyor, Luna, Luna Orbiter, 1960s Missions to Earth's Moon Options

[Bob Shaw]

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?

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Space History Geek Time:

(1) Phil Stooke has got me -- I wasn't aware that this was the main job of the Surveyor descent cameras. (Phil, have you ever considered the possibility of trying to locate the Surveyor 4 landing site, and thus finally laying to absolute rest the faint chance that it just might have suffered a transmitter failure on the way down and thus soft-landed intact?)

(2) According to Aviation Week (and, I believe, several other publications before Surveyor 1's launch), the decision had been reached not to swing out the high-gain antenna for descent photos even before that omni-antenna boom got temporarily stuck on Surveyor 1. (Even at age 12, I was following the space program in obsessive detail back then, as I already had been for 18 months -- I stayed up all night for the first time in my life to watch the Surveyor 1 landing and the first photos from it. That very first photo -- fuzzy though it was -- did clearly show one of the footads sitting intact on the surface, and just a short time later they started getting a parade of other photos in the preliminary 200-line mode that were more legible, including a few nice horizon shots. My comments 10 years later, when the TV networks -- at least on the Pacific coast -- couldn't be troubled to cover the Viking 1 landing live, are unprintable.)

(3) It was Surveyors 8 through 10 that would have had two survey cameras for stereo shots -- along with the alpha-scatter spectrometer, a better-instrumented version of the surface sampler arm for soil mechanics, a one-axis seismometer, a meteoroid ejecta detector, a package of gyros and accelerometers as a "touchdown dynamics experiment" to precisely monitor the landing shock for more soil mechanics data, and a bunch of heaters to allow the craft to be certain of surviving the lunar night.

Originally, in fact, these "Block 2 Surveyors" were supposed to be #5 through 7. But due to NASA's growing need to economize (largely due to Vietnam), plus the near-certain feeling that all the early Surveyors would fail (everyone had traumatic memories of the earlier and easier Ranger program), in early 1965 those three Surveyors were switched to become more of the simple "Block 1" variety -- with the Block 2 missions becoming #8 through 10, whose funding was always provisional. And then in December 1965 those three provisional Surveyors were cancelled.

When #1 shocked everybody -- including yours truly -- by succeeding, JPL was caught flat-footed and hastily had to try and devise a way to add more science instruments after all. The surface sampler and alpha spectrometer were picked as the most valuable possible substitutes for the descent camera. (By the way, NASA was seriously considering the "bunny hop" as early as Surveyor 2; a whole sequence of unfortunate events in the Lemony Snicket tradition delayed it until #6.)

[dvandorn]

(3)  It was Surveyors 8 through 10 that would have had two survey cameras for stereo shots -- along with the alpha-scatter spectrometer, a better-instrumented version of the surface sampler arm for soil mechanics, a one-axis seismometer, a meteoroid ejecta detector, a package of gyros and accelerometers as a "touchdown dynamics experiment" to precisely monitor the landing shock for more soil mechanics data, and a bunch of heaters to allow the craft to be certain of surviving the lunar night. 

Time to fill out the remaining dark corners in the Surveyor program's history...

(A) The original Surveyor program included both orbiter and lander versions. Mostly for management reasons, the Surveyor people got the orbiter taken away and were told to concentrate on developing a soft lander that would work. When a need for an orbiter was still keenly felt, the prosaically-named Lunar Orbiter program was conceived and funded (but given to another contractor).

( Until fairly late in the development cycles of the later Surveyor block modes, there was a Block III design that used a modified Surveyor landing "base" to deliver a small roving vehicle. The entire science package, including the camera system, was located on the rover. For a time, as a last-ditch attempt to extend the Surveyor program, several groups were proposing that NASA skip the Block II flights and go directly from five or six Block I's to Block III rover flights. But the design team continued to have problems, the weight of the vehicle was going to need a more powerful booster than the Atlas-Centaur, and Apollo loomed in the very near future. So an early American lunar version of the MERs (and of Lunokhod) died a-borning.

There is some nice, if spotty, information about the Surveyor rover development attempt in Don Wilhelms' excellent "To a Rocky Moon." Unfortunately, I've never found any drawings or conceptions of any of the designs.

-the other Doug