Word: moone
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Ranger was well settled on its course, J.P.L.'s computers figured that it would curve around the moon and hit a spot that cannot be seen from the earth. Any pictures it might take would be not much use for future astronauts, who will want to land on the visible side. A radio command was sent from J.P.L.'s Goldstone station in the Mojave Desert telling the spacecraft how to correct its course...
Impact. It was triumph enough, but the quavering sound continued. So did the voice on the loudspeaker. "All cameras are functioning. Twenty seconds to impact. We are receiving pictures. Ten seconds to impact." At 6:25:49, the quavering signal abruptly stopped. Ranger had vanished in a puff of moon dust, sending pictures faithfully to the very end. With careful understatement, Dr. William H. Pickering, director of J.P.L., told newsmen: "We had our troubles, but it looks now as if this were a textbook operation...
...good are the 4,316 pictures? And what do they tell about the moon? J.P.L.'s scientists refused to hurry their analysis at the risk of hurting the quality of a single picture. For safety's sake, the long series of snapshots that. came into J.P.L.'s Goldstone antennas in the form of TV signals were recorded in three separate ways. First, the signals were put directly on magnetic tape that could be played back if necessary. They also energized TV picture tubes, where they looked like tiny dots of light moving in lines across the face...
This is how ordinary TV pictures are built up, but the moon shots were scanned more slowly; photographic film was needed to blend them into a pic ture. While each picture was being drawn on the tube, a kinescope camera watched, keeping its shutter open just long enough to catch one entire shot. At intervals, the engineers snapped the face of the tube with a Polaroid camera and got an instant print that gave quick assurance that all was going well...
Zoom. First to get a look at the pictures was a committee of scientists headed by Astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper of the University of Arizona, a man who has spent much of his life peering at the moon through the world's best telescopes. "What has been achieved today is truly remarkable," he announced. "We have made progress in resolution not by a factor of 10, or 100, which would have been already remarkable, but by a factor of 1,000. The moon, which a good telescope can bring to a distance of 500 miles, has been brought...