Fifty years ago today on June 2, 1966, the United States reached a key milestone in its moon program — soft-landing a robotic craft on the lunar surface. The Surveyor 1 spacecraft (and the program as a whole) was key to helping Apollo astronauts reach the moon’s surface in 1969. It wasn’t the first spacecraft to land on the moon — that record is held by the Soviet Luna 9 lander that touched down on Feb. 3, 1966 — but the Surveyor program accomplished several major objectives, such as showing what the surface conditions were like and how to communicate long-distance back to Earth.
The images were collected on tapes and stored away long before computers were commonplace. This means that today, there are few pictures on the Internet showing Surveyor 1’s historic feat in 1966. That’s about to change, however. An intrepid group at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory’s Space Imager Center have painstakingly digitized more than 93,000 photographs from the Surveyor program. In a few months, these pictures should be available to the public.
This slideshow shows a handful of those photos, along with commentary from the team that made their re-emergence possible.
The location of Surveyor 1, in the Oceanus Procellerum region of the moon, as seen by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009 and (inset) a mock-up of the lander on the lunar surface.
Originally published on Discovery News .
Comments are closed.