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_*]

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.