Word: rangers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ranger was preparing itself for its long voyage. Its computer brain came to life and began issuing orders. It spread its purple wings so their silicon cells could make electricity out of sunlight. Its dish antenna unfolded; its tiny eyes (sensors) commanded tiny gas jets to turn the spacecraft so that they could bear on the sun and the earth. Its radios chattered furiously, sending reports that all was going well...
...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...
...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 in the Ranger experiment to a distance of half a mile...
Then Kuiper exhibited a series of ten lunar photographs. The first showed a section of the Sea of Clouds about 78 miles square. It was taken when Ranger was still 470 miles away, and Kuiper said that it showed just about as much detail as the best photographs obtainable with the biggest telescopes on earth. Picture by picture, as the spacecraft sped toward the moon, the scene expanded. Craters seemed to blossom on lunar plains that had looked perfectly smooth; in the next pictures even smaller craters appeared...