Surveyor Overcomes Frustrations to Return Spectacular Lunar Data  |  This Week In Space History

by michael shinabery

The early Ranger missions photographing potential Apollo landing sites weren’t the technology to place a man on the Moon. After transmitting images, the Rangers crashed. Creating safe-landing technology was part of the mission of Ranger’s successor, Surveyor.

“Surveyor spacecraft will be launched to make unmanned soft-landings at several different locations on the surface of the moon,” the Hughes Aircraft Company publication, “Surveyor,” stated. “Their objective is to develop the technology of soft-landing on the Moon and to provide scientific and engineering data to support the manned lunar program.”

On Jan. 19, 1961, the website nasa.gov said, the agency announced Hughes would receive the contract to build Surveyor.

“The Surveyor lunar landers were strange, three-legged machines that, rather than crashing violently as the Rangers had done, would descend gently to the surface,” Douglas Mudgway wrote in “William H. Pickering: America’s Deep Space Pioneer” (NASA, 2008). In addition, he said “they would deliver video and science measurements in real-time from the Moon to engineers and scientists at JPL,” the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Once on the Moon, Mudgway said, Surveyor would provide “close-up photographs of the near and distant lunar landscapes,” which would “stream continuously to Earth during the lunar daytime when solar power would be available. The findings of these complex spacecraft would surely provide the Apollo mission designers with the critical details of the strength of the lunar soil on which the safety of the manned landings depended.”

However, getting Surveyor Moon-bound would be “a huge technological challenge,” Mudgway said. According to “We Reach The Moon” (Bantam, 1969), Surveyor missed the intended first launch date, in1963 and “was nowhere near the flight stage when Apollo planners looked to it for help.” The budgeted $72.5 million exploded to “ten times the original estimates.”

Not until 1966 would the first Surveyor land – three months after the Soviet Union made the world’s first soft lunar landing with Luna 9. Subsequently, Surveyor 1 proved to be “a perfect success,” said Joseph Green, who worked on the “countdown board at Cape Kennedy.” He gave readers of the March 1967 Analog a first-hand look at what a mission was like, both the Surveyor 1 triumph and the frustrations of testing failures.

“We were three years behind schedule and unhappy because we had had only two successes out of six launch attempts,” Green wrote of the Atlas-Centaur rocket. “The most recent launch attempt had been only a partial success. The Centaur had ridden into the sky on its Atlas booster and performed perfectly on its first burn, placing itself and a dummy Surveyor in an almost perfect parking orbit. The Centaur was programmed to restart, after twenty-five minutes of coasting, for the second and longer burn that would carry it and the dummy spacecraft to a simulated moon.”

Green said second ignition did occur. However, “for a brief moment we had all been happily jubilant, but then word had come from the Carnarvon (tracking) station in Australia that it had failed to acquire the Centaur and spacecraft. Anxious minutes later we knew the truth. A problem in the Propellant Feed system had resulted in only a tiny amount of fuel reaching the engines. They had shut off after barely starting Second Burn.”

All Surveyors were of a similar design. At liftoff they weighed 2,200 pounds; once on the Moon, after using fuel and shedding guidance and landing equipment, the 11-foot-high robotic craft weighed 600 pounds. Their three deployed legs splayed 15-feet in diameter.

Surveyor 1 transmitted images and data for 220 days, including the first color images from the Moon. Homer E. Newell, Ph.D., then NASA associate administrator for space science and applications, wrote in National Geographic (October 1966) that over the first 14 days alone, Surveyor I executed “more than 100,000 earth orders.” The craft “proved its ability to survive the furnace heat of the lunar noon, then go through the deep freeze of the 14-day-long lunar night at temperatures nearly 500 degrees colder, and still operate.”

In addition, “for the first time,” Newell said, “because of Surveyor, Project Apollo officials feel real assurance that an astronaut can safely set foot on the moon, that the moon’s surface will support him, and that he will not be swallowed up in a thick sea of dust.”

“Surveyor 2, launched about three months later, experienced a failure during its midcourse maneuver and crashed,” Mudgway said. NASA laid the blame on the vernier engine, a stabilization engine which “failed to ignite.”

Surveyor 3 took 6,315 photographs, according to NASA; “its soil sampler made pressure tests, dug small trenches, and picked up several rock-like objects.”

Surveyor 4 “failed just minutes before touchdown,” when controllers lost contact “We Reach The Moon” said.

Surveyor 5 landed in the Sea of Tranquility, near the future Apollo 11 site where Neil Armstrong would be the first man to walk on the Moon.

Surveyor 6 actually re-launched off the surface, rising 10 feet and resettling eight feet away. Never before had any craft launched from a surface other than Earth.

Surveyor 7 landed in the southern highlands, a site which a Jan. 4, 1968 NASA release declared was as “geologically different as possible from the lowland mare sites investigated by previous Surveyors.”

Each mission officially ended when the craft’s battery died. In less than two years, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would not only step out of Apollo 11 onto the lunar surface, but Apollo 12 would land near Surveyor 3. Pete Conrad would walk right up to one of the craft that helped to prove the Moon safe for man.

Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and humanities scholar with the New Mexico Museum of Space History.