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Posted by: Bob Shaw Apr 21 2005, 08:07 PM

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?

Posted by: Phil Stooke Apr 21 2005, 08:43 PM

What a coincidence that you should ask this question! As it happens, lots of things are happenning here. I assume people know about:

http://cps.earth.northwestern.edu/LO/index.html

and

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/LunarOrbiterDigitization/

and

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/

and

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunar_atlases/

(Lunar Orbiter images, plus some maps and Apollo stuff - browse and full res)

For Surveyor, the images were horrible, as you say. As far as I know nobody has ever been foolish enough to try to do anything with the full panoramas... until now. I scanned assembled pans at LPI in Houston, USGS in Flagstaff and LPL in Tucson. I am painstakingly fixing all the problems to create large (10000 to 15000 pixel wide) digital pans for each site. Surveyors 1, 3 and 7 are done, 5 is half done, six next year. This is a job that would drive you nuts if you were not already so challenged, so I only do one a year. This is being done for my International Atlas of Lunar Exploration, to be published in 2007. The atlas also covers all lunar missions including Soviet ones (e.g. maps of photo coverage from orbiters, day by day lunokhod route maps), and site selection for ranger, surveyor and apollo (the latter a fully illustrated account from the minutes of the meetings). So lots of things are being done.

Phil Stooke

Posted by: Bob Shaw Apr 21 2005, 08:53 PM

Phil:

Terrific!

I don't suppose there are any sample images available? I'm thinking Surveyor VII in particular (as if you hadn't guessed!).

Posted by: dvandorn Apr 22 2005, 09:07 AM

You and me both! I'd dearly like to see the Tycho rim where the horrible joins between the frames don't dominate. I daresay it might be the most fascinating and beautiful lunar vista ever captured by cameras -- I can't wait to see Phil's work!

-the other Doug

Posted by: Phil Stooke Apr 22 2005, 03:50 PM

I will post some Surveyor stuff when I have time. There are two low resolution pans of mine on LPOD - Lunar Picture of the Day (www.lpod.org):

Surveyor 1: http://www.lpod.org/LPOD-2004-07-09.htm

Surveyor 3: http://www.lpod.org/archive/2004/04/LPOD-2004-04-20.htm

and here I attach a greatly reduced version of the Surveyor 5 pan I'm working on now:

Surveyor 7 - I'll prepare something soon. It is a nice pan! But I wouldn't call it "the most fascinating and beautiful lunar vista ever captured by cameras" - not after Apollos 15 and 17.

Surveyor 3 looks very bland. The mission had serious camera problems caused by dust thrown up by the small 'vernier' landing thrusters. Individual frames were not just subject to shading variations but also to dust contamination on one side. The camera pointing mechanism was partly clogged with dust, so only 90 percent of a full pan was possible, and many frames were taken with high sun or looking down-sun so lighting was bad. It was a nightmare, taking three months of near full time work (good job I have tenure!), but it does show the trenches - this was the first robotic arm ever operated on another world - and at full res it does show a lot of detail of rocks on the horizon etc., lost in the reduced LPOD view.

Posted by: Bob Shaw Apr 22 2005, 07:28 PM

Phil:

Very, very interesting - and the 'work in progress' element is of interest in it's own right. That looks like a *lot* of effort, and I can't wait to see the hi-res images when they come!

Are you going to attempt 3-D image creation using the Surveyor V pre and post 'hop' data?

Posted by: Phil Stooke Apr 22 2005, 08:27 PM

No! I have to leave something for other folks to tackle... I don't have the expertise for that anyway.

Phil

Posted by: ilbasso Apr 22 2005, 09:45 PM

Absolutely brilliant work, Phil! I'll be looking for a copy of your Atlas when it comes out!

Posted by: 4th rock from the sun Apr 22 2005, 11:35 PM

Very good Phil!!!

Can you tell us the size of the panoramas in degrees?
Are they 360ºx90º ?
Surveyor 3 is smaller by what amount?

Posted by: Phil Stooke Apr 23 2005, 01:38 PM

The Surveyor pans are 360 wide, though a hardware limit leaves a diagonal gap "behind" the camera where it would be looking through the central mast of the Surveyor frame. (you get glimpses of the ground through the frame). In the forward direction the pans extend from the horizon to the limit of visibility of the surface, about 70 degrees of image height. BUT the cylindrical pans which I am using are limited to more like 60 degrees height by the projection geometry.

Lots of variations on these pans were made, and much more could be done with them than I am going to be able to do. There is a book called Atlas of Surveyor 5 Images which shows multiple pans (in sections, not in the cylindrical geometry) with different lighting. Sadly, not published for the other missions.

Less known is that Surveyors 1 and 2 carried descent imaging systems... but they were never used. S1 did try to take a picture with it after landing to test the electronics, but it failed. It wasn't used during descent because it would cut too much into engineering data transmission, and frankly they didn't expect the first one to land successfully.

Phil

Posted by: Phil Stooke Apr 23 2005, 01:40 PM

The Surveyor pans are 360 wide, though a hardware limit leaves a diagonal gap "behind" the camera where it would be looking through the central mast of the Surveyor frame. (you get glimpses of the ground through the frame). In the forward direction the pans extend from the horizon to the limit of visibility of the surface, about 70 degrees of image height. BUT the cylindrical pans which I am using are limited to more like 60 degrees height by the projection geometry.

Lots of variations on these pans were made, and much more could be done with them than I am going to be able to do. There is a book called Atlas of Surveyor 5 Images which shows multiple pans (in sections, not in the cylindrical geometry) with different lighting. Sadly, not published for the other missions.

Less known is that Surveyors 1 and 2 carried descent imaging systems... but they were never used. S1 did try to take a picture with it after landing to test the electronics, but it failed. It wasn't used during descent because it would cut too much into engineering data transmission, and frankly they didn't expect the first one to land successfully.

Phil

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 23 2005, 03:25 PM

As I understand it, another factor behind not using the Surveyor descent camera was that it probably couldn't have provided any photos much better than the Lunar Orbiters' very sharp high-resolution lens photos -- and, of course, covering a much tinier area. (Especially since the plumes from the various landing rockets were though likely to fog up its lens.) They ended up, instead, removing the descent camera on the last five Surveyors and using its power and signal leads for other instruments: the surface sampler on #3 and 4, the alpha-scatter spectrometer on 5 and 6, and both of them on 7. A pity they didn't think of that earlier.

In that connection, by the way, I heard a remarkable story at a meeting of AIAA engineers in January. While they got a magnificent sequence of descent photos from NEAR during its final descent to the surface of Eros -- the camera stayed in clear focus at much closer range than anticipated -- they lost the photos from the last few hundred feet of descent, because the spacecraft's high-gain antenna moved out of line with Earth at that point. After landing, NEAR's engineers had the bright idea of using its thrusters to lift it off from the surface long enough for it to point its high-gain dish at Earth and return those last recorded photos. Unfortunately, while they were eagerly planning this, nobody thought to turn off the spacecraft's attitude-control system -- and so it quietly exhausted its hydrazine supply by trying to stabilize the entire asteroid. World War III will probably start in much the same way.

Posted by: Phil Stooke Apr 23 2005, 04:08 PM

Bruce, the main purpose of the descent camera, of course, was to locate the landing point, so coverage or resolution compared with LO was not really important. On that subject, the only Surveyor not precisely located in high resolution images was Surveyor 5 (because there were no high resolution images of its site, including later Apollo images). I think a reasonable location can be proposed now based on crater rims on the horizon, and I will include it in my forthcoming book. I'm trying to do the same for Luna 17 as well, in support of new efforts to reacquire its laser retroreflector.

Phil

Posted by: ilbasso Apr 23 2005, 07:28 PM

As for fascinating and beautiful vistas, I also have to add a vote for some of the wild pictures that NEAR sent back of Eros, like
http://cps.earth.northwestern.edu/NEAR/HANDM/168_bw_eros.png

Posted by: edstrick Apr 23 2005, 08:50 PM

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.

Posted by: Bob Shaw Apr 23 2005, 09:10 PM

It was the Surveyor I landing which hooked me for life as a kid - I remember to this day the (unusual) BBC TV coverage of it, and the 'Live From The Moon' caption on the screen (and an utterly unintelligible picture!). There had already been much excitement created by the Daily Express and Sir Bernard Lovell's Jodrell Bank coup with regard to the first Soviet unmanned landing, so I guess we were all primed for it, poor though the initial images were.

I applaud the hard work being put into these old friends, and can *hardly* wait for the more-or-less finished items (I say 'more-or-less' because I'm sure they'll be a work in progress, forever being tweaked toward perfection!).

Posted by: tedstryk Apr 24 2005, 12:17 AM

I imagine some 3-D data could be reconstructed for the Surveyors using data from different sun angles. It is is important to remember that, while certainly poor by todays standards, the Surveyors carried the best cameras to operate on the lunar surface of any unmanned mission/mission series (granted, the rest were Soviet).

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 24 2005, 12:44 AM

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.)

Posted by: Phil Stooke Apr 24 2005, 03:36 AM

It would not be possible to locate Surveyor 4 without images from the surface. The principal method for locating a lander on a planet's surface, from Surveyor 1 to MER, is to compare horizon topography with orbital images. Ewen Whitaker did this first for Surveyors 1 and 3, then 6 and 7. 5 was not located at the time, but he and I agree on a probable location now.

The only other methods would be (1) descent imaging (Ranger, Apollo, Huygens... and MER partially, but it didn't take images all the way down because its images were primarily for the motion stabilization system), and (2) actually resolving the spacecraft on the surface in orbital images (Surveyor 1, Apollos 15, 16, 17, MER).

We don't have orbital photography adequate to locate Surveyor 4, either its impact crater or an intact landed spacecraft. Viking Lander 2 is still the subject of searches by some of us, both by horizon feature identification and direct imaging.

Phil Stooke

Posted by: dvandorn Apr 24 2005, 06:57 AM

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

Posted by: edstrick Apr 24 2005, 08:07 AM

Good additional info there. I'm pretty sure I've heard the bit on the Surveyor 1 descent camera both ways, so I'm not sure the real story.

There was a series of JPL technical reports on progress in developing flight missions and other research and development, put out regularly as a geekish collection of reports in a quasi magazine jumble. I don't recall the series name, but it ran from the early 60's to maybe 1968 or so (budget cuts progressively killed much of NASA's published documentation after that). It was not the JPL Technical Report TR-##-#### series, which published the Mariner 2, 4, 69, 71 Ranger 7-9, etc mission reports. There is an enormous amount of info on the project developments in those, particularly Surveyor and block 4+ Rangers (ones after Ranger 9, which never flew)... instrument development stuff, etc.

A lot of this stuff is archived in government depositories in university engineering or aerospace libraries, if they haven't been able to through this "obsolete junk" out yet.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 24 2005, 09:37 AM

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.

Posted by: edstrick Apr 24 2005, 09:45 AM

Interesting!....

The Surveyor cameras were analog TV, and transmitted a slow scan analog signal. The 200 line mode was intended for omni antenna transmission and took quite a while.. maybe 5 min for a pic. <Memory here.> The 600 line mode pics were transmitted by the high gain antenna and could come back a bit slower than maybe 1 per minute. Data was recorded directly onto analog magnetic tape, and (probably) simultaneously onto film in a slow-scan film recorder.

Later in the program, selected images, for test and somtimes for scientific purposes, were digitized, radiometrically decalibrated, and put on film. The image quality removed ghosting effects in the raw film records and quite considerably improved the data. Some samples were shown of this for Surveyor 1, at least. This processing was done for colorimetric and polarimetric work to get "absolute" and polarimetry data on selected targets, but relatively little was published of this, and no decalibrated color pictures, as far as I recall.

I'm inclined to doubt that the analog tapes of the Surveyor data survive, but ghods (and the Great Ghoul of the Galaxy) only know!

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 24 2005, 09:59 AM

The Shadow Knows! (Pause for deep, chilling laughter.)

Aviation Week, March 28, 1966: "One result of conservative mission planning ws a decision not to use the approach TV camera aboard SC-1 [Surveyor-1]. The camera, built by Hughes around a General Electrodynamics vidicon tube, was to have taken as many as 100 pictures of the Moon'surface from between 1000 to 80 miles above the surfce, just before ignition of the spacecrft's main retrorocket.

"Use of the approach camera was deleted from the first Surveyor mission even before the problems wih the planar array high-gain antenna wer discovered. [This is a reference to the previous section of the article, which refers to a problem discovered with the pointing motors on the solar panel and antenna at low temperatures -- leading to a change in their design starting with Surveyor 2.]

"It was felt that the use of the approach camera would introduce risky complications during the terminal descent phase of the mission, according to S.C. Shallon, chief Surveyor program scientist for Hughes. Transmission of the 600-line frames would have required additional commands -- needed to maneuver the spacecraft, aim the planar array high-gain antenna at Earth and activate the camera.

"Another reason was that the transmission of blocks of pictures would produce blank spots in the spacecraft telemetry record at a critical time.

"Doubts about the ability of the A/SPP polar axis [motor] to position the planar array on command cemented the decision not to use the approach TV. This is because the center of gravity of the spcecraft during the critical main retrorocket firing phase must be determined before launch, based on the planned position of the solar panel and planar array at the time of rocket ignition. This determines the placement of the 8700-pound thrust solid-propellant retromotor within the aluminum frame.

"Failure of the polar axis to orient the planar array to its programmed position could have disastrous effects upon the stability of the spacecraft during retro-firing...

"Hughes is proceeding with S-2, 3 and 4 as if the high-gain antenna will be aimed at the Earth in the pre-terminal phase and approach TV will be used. However, the decision to use the camera will not be made until after SC-1 performance is analyzed. [I never saw anything suggesting that they'd decided to use it on Surveyor 2. By the way, the failure of the attempt to turn it on for a test after landing on Surveyor 1 was due to the fact that they only tried this after Surveyor 1 had survived its first lunar night, during which it underwent serious battery damage from the cold. For the same reason, an attempt to briefly burp its vernier rockets to study the effect on the surface failed; that test had to be delayed until Surveyor 5, since the walls of the crater in which Surveyor 3 landed made it overheat and they had to quickly vent the verniers' helium.]

"Even if the approach TV is not used on later missions, it is possible that the planar array still may be aimed at Earth during the pre-terminal phase and used with the high-power transmitter to increase the telemetry transmission at that time to 4400 bits/second from the 1100 bits/sec. that is possible using one of the two omnidirectional antennas. [They never actually did.]

"However, transmission would still be switched to an omniantenna after main retromotor burnout, because it is expected that during the final vernier engine descent phase, in the last 2-2.5 minutes before landing, the high-gain antenna would probably become pointed away from the Earth."

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 24 2005, 10:01 AM

By the way, that JPL series on their projects (several very short volumes each quarter) was called "Space Programs Summary".

Posted by: edstrick Apr 24 2005, 11:07 AM

Ah!... an article from Aviation "Leak" I never saw back then or since. Details not in the Surveyor 1 Mission Report volumes JPL put out.

Posted by: PhilHorzempa Apr 24 2006, 09:05 PM

[size=2]


To continue this discussion of Surveyor 1, I recall seeing a document at
the NASA HQ History Office that detailed the original suite of intruments that
were planned for the Surveyor lunar landers. It's been a while since I saw
that documant, so memories are a little fuzzy, but I think that the original
design featured items such as a Drill and some form of Spectrometer. Also,
I think that these varius intruments were mounted on some type of carousel.

Alas, as we all know, those instruments were never flown by the Surveyors.
In fact, a drill has never been included on an American lunar or planetary probe.
Does anyone know if the Soviets ever inlcuded one?


Another Phil

Posted by: Bob Shaw Apr 24 2006, 09:42 PM

Another Phil:

Yes; that's how the samples were obtained for the Soviet Lunar sample return missions. And speaking of Phils, a certain Dr Stooke gets big mentions in the latest issue of the BIS 'Spaceflight' magazine for his work mapping the moons of Mars.

Bob Shaw

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 24 2006, 10:52 PM

I've got quite a bit more in the way of details on the early planned Surveyor payloads. In fact, one of the first aerospace articles I ever photocopied (back in 1966) was a detailed 1962 article on the huge payload they had planned for Surveyor at the start, which did indeed include a drill -- along with everything else up to and including the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a partridge in a pear tree.

In Nov. 1962, they scaled it radically down to a smaller payload including one descent and 2 survey cameras, a meteoroid ejecta detector, the surface sampler, a soil mechanics tester (with bearing strength and shear strength sensors), and an X-ray diffractometer hooked up to a rock grinder (which would have been loaded by the surface sampler) -- plus the alpha-particle spectrometer as a possible add-on, and the 1-axis seismometer and surface magnetic susceptibility and thermal diffusivity sensors as possible alternates. In 1963 they dumped the XRD and its grinder, replaced the soil mechanics tester with sensors on the surface sampler, and added the alpha-scatter sensors and seismometer plus a set of "touchdown dynamics" sensors. This became the official payload for the "Block 2 Surveyors", which were originally supposed to be #5 through 7 (and which also would have retained full ability to survive lunar nights).

In December 1965, saddled by continuing cost problems and Centaur failures, they dumped those and turned the last three Surveyors into Block 1s, which had lesser telemetry capability -- and then, after the unexpected success of Surveyor 1, they had to hastily jury-rig a plan to replace the descent camera on each of the last 5 Surveyors with another, more useful science instrument, thus allowing more science studies without having to expand the craft's telemetry and power systems. A few months after Surveyor 1's landing, they decided to install the surface sampler on #3 and 4 (minus its special soil bearing strength and shear strength sensors, using motor-current loads instead for those purposes); and a few months after that they picked the alpha-scatter sensor for the last 3 Surveyors. (Their reasoning in picking those two instgruments is left as a pretty easy exercise for the reader.) In early 1967 they realized that they could carry both instruments on #7.

As for the Lunas: all the sample-return missions carried drills. But Lunas 16 and 20 (plus, presumably, the crashed #18) carried only short ones that were intended to return 30-cm cores (and were actually stopped by rocks before that point). Lunas 23 and 24 carried drills to return core samples up to 2.5 meters long. (The arrangement was ingenious; the drill stem carried a flexible snake-type internal liner which was actually pulled out of the buried drill and coiled up inside the sample-return capsule, only slightly damaging the stratigraphy of the sample.) Luna 23 was damaged during its 1974 landing in "rough terrain" and couldn't use its drill -- I'd like to know more about that incident -- but #24 flew completely successfully 2 years later (after a delay caused by the Kremlin's determination at that time to try to design a Mars sample-return mission, a fool's quest that also led to the cancellation of Lunokhod 3 and staff cuts that probably caused the failures of the surface instruments on Venera 11 and 12). Apparently it returned a 1.6-meter core sample, which may have been a bit shorter than hoped -- although I'm getting fuzzy Web information on that.

Posted by: edstrick Apr 25 2006, 05:15 AM

One other distinction I remember reading about the block 1 Surveyors... They carried a lot of engineering sensors and telemetry capability. Temperature sensors, voltages, whatever, all intended to provide gobs of information on vehicle performance during flight and landing and afterwards. Much of that... sensors, wiring, switching-boxes, encoders, whatever... would have been deleted from the block 2 Surveyors in favor of science instrumentation.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 25 2006, 05:54 AM

I didn't know that. It is a fact, though, that they decided that the data from the regular engineering sensors on the Surveyors, such as the strain gauges and gyros, were an adequate substitute for the quite numerous sensors they had on that "Touchdown Dynamics" experiment -- which even included a whole second gyro package!

Posted by: edstrick Apr 25 2006, 10:47 AM

I could be wrong on that.. I'm working from faded memories.

Posted by: Bob Shaw Apr 25 2006, 03:16 PM

Bruce:

Last year you mentioned, more or less in passing, that you had come across details of a an early proposal for a Surveyor sample return mission - but I don't think you ever gave us any more than that. Do you have any more details? It sounded fascinating!

Bob Shaw

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 25 2006, 09:42 PM

It was an Aviation Week issue all the way back from 1961, and I'd have to track it down at the Calif. State U.-Sacramento library the next time I get down there. It was quite detailed (including a picture). A little capsule capable of containing 1 pound of samples would have been mounted on a solid rocket sitting on a tiltable spin table fastened to Surveyor. It's an image of how US lunar exploration would probably have developed had we stuck to unmanned exploration.

Posted by: Bob Shaw Apr 25 2006, 10:03 PM

Bruce:

Thanks! Sometime soon I hope to have my run of early 'Spaceflight' and JBIS out of storage, and I'll have a look there too - I know there were photos in that of the fully-instrumented Surveyor (two cameras, big vertical box thing (the drill?)) which might be of interest.

Bob Shaw

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 25 2006, 10:54 PM

While I'm at the library (whenever I do finally get there), I'll dredge up that 1962 article listing (in detail!) all the science instruments originally planned for Surveyor, which was in "Missiles and Rocket" magazine. By the way, that 1962 National Geographic (October, I think) which had the detailed article on how the Ranger 5 mission was supposed to go followed up its 15 or so beautifully detailed paintings of the mission's very steps with two of that current model of Surveyor (complete with drill).

Posted by: PhilHorzempa May 1 2006, 03:08 AM

I want to comment on a memo that I saw in the NASA HQ History Office
concerning the Apollo LMSS, the Lunar Mapping and Survey System. I am
including it in this thread as I now think that the cancellation of the LMSS may
have been connnected to the decision to hold off on the flight of Lunar Orbiter 6.

I do not recall who sent the memo, but one of the details in it caught my
immediate attention. One of the reasons for developing the LMSS, this memo
indicated, was that it would enable a detailed photo recon, from lunar orbit, in
case the first manned Apollo landing attempt ended in a crash. The memo
seemed to indicate that the LMSS would provide photographic evidence in
case there were no communications with the Apollo LM crew.

Needless to say, I was flabbergasted by this memo. I had never heard of this
justification for the LMSS. Does anyone in the UMSF community recall anything
of this nature? In addition, does anyone have diagrams, artist's concepts, etc, of the
LMSS? As far as the Internet, the LMSS appears to be a stealth program. I have
not found anyone images of what the LMSS was supposed to look like.

Getting back to Lunar Orbiter 6. According to Bruce Beyers' excellent history of
the Lunar Orbiter, the 6th spacecraft could have been flown very cheaply.
It could have produced complete Far Side photo coverage akin to LO 4's Near Side coverage.
Is it possible that after having cancelled the LMSS, that NASA was holding Lunar Orbiter 6
"in its vest pocket" waiting to see the fate of Apollo 11?

In addition, I find the LMSS crash recon story interesting in today's Mars program
where we all are waiting to see what images from the MRO can tell us about the fates
of the MPL and Beagle 2.


Another Phil

Posted by: dvandorn May 1 2006, 04:09 AM

Well... all I can tell you is that I've probably read every single scrap of documentation publically available on the Apollo and unmanned precursor lunar programs, and that's a new one on me. I had never read that before.

I assume the LMSS they speak of was the mission module being designed for the Apollo I-series missions? The LM chassis loaded up with a ton of cameras and sensors? That would have been lunar-orbit-only missions? That were never flown (but explain why the Apollo landings went from H missions straight to J missions)?

-the other Doug

Posted by: BruceMoomaw May 1 2006, 08:52 AM

Gadfry! That's a completely new one on me. I suppose it's possible, but the Lunar Orbiter history ("Destination Moon") says that the decision not to fly LO 6 was actually made before the launch of LO 5 back in 1967. I've had in mind for some time, as a future project, trying to get hold of "Destination Moon's" source documents on that decision -- but, once again, I find it hard to visualize a connection. Still, if there WAS a crash and its cause was uncertain from telemetry, NASA might very well have wanted to fly a reasonably cheap orbital recon mission to investigate the crash site, and dragging LO 6's spare parts out of storage to assemble it belatedly might very well have been a course of action they would have followed. (It should be remembered that LO 6 was never assembled -- they just thought they had enough spare parts manufactured in the LO program by then that they would have been able to assemble another LO for much less than the cost of the previous ones.)

Posted by: ljk4-1 May 1 2006, 02:35 PM

For those of you who may be in the Washington, D.C. area on May 3:

National Air and Space Museum

Curator's Choice

The Surveyor III Camera and the Possibility of Life in the Universe

Roger Launius

Wednesday, May 03

12:00 PM to 12:15 PM

Milestones of Flight - Gallery 100

National Mall Building

Admission: Free

Talks typically last 10-15 minutes and begin at the Museum "Great Seal", in the Milestones of Flight gallery on the first floor.

The Curator's Choice lecture series at the National Mall building is presented every Wednesday at noon. A Museum staff member talks to the public about the history, collection, or personalities related to a specific artifact or exhibition in the Museum.

Web site URL:

http://www.nasm.si.edu/events/eventDetail.cfm?eventID=440

Posted by: PhilHorzempa May 1 2006, 08:52 PM

Concerning the plan for the LMSS, I may have a photocopy of the memo, but
it may take some time to track it down. As I recall, the purpose of this short memo
may have been to reiterate reasons for continuing the LMSS project, which probably
puts it in 1967. Again, it came as a shock to me to realize that thought had been given
to what to do if the first manned Apollo landing ended with silence.

Also, again I would appreciate any technical info on the LMSS project. For instance,
did the Pan and Metric cameras, used in the Apollo J flights, migrate to the SIM Bay
from the LMSS?

On the subject of the previous post - Roger Launius' upcoming talk about the
Surveyor 3 camera and the Possibility of Life in the Universe, I hope that he will
not be spreading the Urban Legend about Strep microbes surviving for 3 years on
the Moon. The Space History quarterly, QUEST, will be publishing a letter, from me,
in its next issue, in which I expand on the highly questionable "evidence" that
microbes survived in the Surveyor 3 camera for 3 years. In brief, it is highly probable
that a miscue by a lab tech contaminated the sample which indicated signs of life.
In addition, only 1 out of 33 samples so tested showed positive evidence of microbes.
The dramatic suggestion that microbes are tough enough to survive on the Moon for
3 years has been accepted all too readily by historians and scientists, who should know
better.
As Carl Sagan eloquently stated, "Extraordinary claims require exraordinary evidence."
The Surveyor 3 microbe claim does not meet this requirement, and hence my label of
Urban Legend for that claim.


Another Phil

Posted by: PhilCo126 May 4 2006, 08:20 AM

Spacecraftfilms.com is planning a DVD-set of ' Unmanned Explorers to the Moon ' by September 2007:
http://www.spacecraftfilms.com/future.html

Posted by: ljk4-1 May 19 2006, 04:27 PM

There was an earlier request for an image of the original design for the
Surveyor lunar lander with all its bells and whistles.

Here it is:

http://utenti.lycos.it/paoloulivi/sur_b2.jpg


There is also an early design proposal drawing of the Lunar Orbiter:

http://utenti.lycos.it/paoloulivi/lo_early.jpg


Lots of goodies here, including a drawing of Voyager 3 as a Jupiter orbiter:

http://utenti.lycos.it/paoloulivi/never.html

Posted by: BruceMoomaw May 20 2006, 04:16 PM

That drawing of Surveyor in a 1962 issue of "Missiles and Rockets" -- which I swear by the ghost of Willy Ley I will post here as soon as I can reach a copy of it -- actually labelled all the parts and scientific instruments of the craft on the drawing (and, my God, were they numerous). There's also a nice color painting of it as the very last in the series of excellent paintings in that October 1962 National Geographic article on how Ranger 5 would have worked.

Posted by: PhilHorzempa May 26 2006, 03:43 AM

I've been thinking lately that it would be neat to try to re-create
the views that Rangers 3 and 6 would have had of the Moon.

To note, Ranger 3 flew by the Moon (instead of impacting it and
deploying the balsa-wood lander) because of over-thrust of its
Atlas-Agena launcher. An attempt was made to photograph the
Moon as Ranger 3 flew by, but, sadly, the spacecraft did not correctly
execute those plans and no images were returned.

Ranger 6 successfully impacted the Moon, in the Sea of Tranquility,
I believe. However, no photos were returned as its camera system
was "fried" during ascent from Florida.

With images from the Lunar Orbiters and Clementine, I think that
those views could now be produced by those with more computer
know-how than I have.


Another Phil

Posted by: ljk4-1 Jun 1 2006, 04:22 AM

Fortieth anniversary time of the launch and landing of the first successful USA probe
on the Moon - Surveyor 1 in 1966.

Also the 35th anniversary of the launch of Mariner 9 in 1971.

Courtesy of Larry Kellogg's mailing list:

May 30, 2006 - 35th Anniversary (1971), Mariner 9 Launch (USA Mars Orbiter)

- 40th Anniversary (1966), Surveyor 1 Launch (USA Moon Lander)

My how time flies.

1966 - gas $0.32 - :-)

http://www.1960sflashback.com/1966/Economy.asp

- LRK -

JPL Space Calendar helps with the memories.

-------------------------------------------------------------
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=1966-045A

Surveyor 1 was the first spacecraft launched in the Surveyor program and the
first soft landing on the Moon by the United States.

Launch Date/Time: 1966-05-30 at 14:41:00 UTC
On-orbit Dry Mass: 294.3 kg
-------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=1971-051A

The Mariner Mars 71 mission was planned to consist of two spacecraft to
orbit Mars on complementary missions, but due to the failure of Mariner 8 to
launch properly, only one spacecraft was available.

Launch Date/Time: 1971-05-30 at 22:23:00 UTC
On-orbit Dry Mass: 558.8 kg
Nominal Power Output: 500 W

Posted by: ljk4-1 Jun 1 2006, 01:44 PM

Mike Dinn, who in 1966 worked on the Surveyor 1 mission at the
Tidbinbilla Deep Space tracking station in Australia, has posted a scan
of a mosaic of lunar photos taken by the probe and received at
Tidbinbilla.

There are also audio recordings of major events during the mission:

http://honeysucklecreek.net/msfn_missions/preparingforapollo/Surveyor

Check out the fading yellow scotch tape.

Posted by: Bob Shaw Jun 1 2006, 01:52 PM

Don't tell Phil Stooke! He'll not know whether to laugh or cry...

Bob Shaw

Posted by: gndonald Nov 5 2006, 09:04 AM

I'm intrigued, especially about those 'Block IV+' Rangers, what were they planning to do?

Posted by: edstrick Nov 6 2006, 10:51 AM

Block 4 was to include more block 2 type retro-rockets and landing balsa capsules. Seismic and/or Luna-9 grade TV, I think.

Posted by: gndonald Nov 8 2006, 02:32 PM

Makes sense that after the got the bugs sorted out that they would try and do what they originally planned. Its also understandable that after the success of the Surveyor landers that such planning would have been shelved.

Posted by: Phil Stooke Nov 8 2006, 04:22 PM

According to:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4210/pages/Cover.htm

Block 4 was to include better imaging and other "non-visual" science (fields and particles), while a briefly considered Block 5 would have included hard-landers.

Phil

Posted by: dvandorn Nov 9 2006, 12:03 AM

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