Word: spacecrafts
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...background music there would be the high whine of telemetry signals literally coming from out of this world. With the aid of some of the nation's greatest scientists and engineers, that unprobable show was precisely what the TV networks offered their audience last week. Live from the spacecraft Ranger IX came man's closest and sharpest look at his lunar neighbor...
...series of pictures that Ranger sent home from its final dive began with a view of the Crater Alphonsus and its neighbors, a picture that just about matched the best that have been taken by the biggest telescopes on earth. Then, as the spacecraft plunged toward its impact point, the lunar landscape expanded. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the field of view narrowed (see cuts), and details emerged that had never before been glimpsed by human eyes...
...tugged by the moon's gravitation until it reached the speed of nearly 6,000 m.p.h. Its cameras never faltered. They sent their pictures to the end, giving countless millions of televiewers a look at the crater floor as it might be seen from the cockpit of a spacecraft about to land. The last pictures were transmitted just .45 seconds before impact from three-quarters of a mile above the lunar surface. They showed objects as small as ten inches...
Delicate Perfection. From start to crash, the flight of Ranger IX was a model of perfection, a triumph of tight coordination between computer-armed men on earth and an incredibly delicate spacecraft, outbound at the end of a far-ranging radio beam. The takeoff from Cape Kennedy developed no trouble at all; the original aim was so good that Ranger IX would have hit the moon without course correction. But the scientists at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are well practiced by now; they intended to do much better than that. When the spacecraft...
When Ranger was 1,300 miles from the moon, other orders climbed the radio beam from California and told the spacecraft to turn on its six TV cameras. Without further fuss the incredible moon photos began to come down in a steady stream. In 1.3 seconds they made the long journey from the moon to J.P.L.'s control station in the Mojave Desert. They jumped by microwave to Pasadena, appeared in crisp detail on fine-grained, 1,152-line picture tubes and were transformed into the standard 500-line pictures of U.S. commercial television. Never had so many people...