Word: surveyor
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Most striking of all are the closeups of Surveyor 3, which had not been seen by man since it was sent to the moon some 2½ years ago. In one shot, Astronaut Conrad is shown examining Surveyor as it stands in its crater. In the background, protruding above the crater's edge, only 600 ft. away, Intrepid and the nearby umbrella antenna gleam in the sunlight. To the dismay of scientists-who wanted to study the discoloration of Surveyor's white paint-all of the Surveyor pictures are in black and white; while photographing the little craft...
...week's end, as Apollo 12's astronauts bedded down in the LRL for the remainder of their 21-day quarantine, NASA was making plans for its next lunar expedition. Buoyed by the bull's-eye at Surveyor Crater, the space agency tentatively scheduled the launch of Apollo 13 for March 12 and picked the most difficult site to date for man's next lunar landing: the ancient highlands near the mountain-ringed crater Fra Mauro...
Having tracked Surveyor's flight by radar, Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Lab determined that Surveyor had landed some where in a three-square-mile area in the south eastern corner of the Ocean of Storms. From the pictures that Survey or had transmitted, they also knew that it was standing in a crater about 100 yds. wide. Unfortunately, there were about 1,000 craters of that size within the probable landing area. Which one held the mooncraft...
University of Arizona Astronomer Ewen A. Whitaker set about to find out. Examining panoramic photographs taken by the spacecraft's TV camera from just 5 ft. off the ground, he saw a pair of large rocks inside Surveyor's crater. Looking further, he noticed that the rocks and two small craters on the floor of the crater were aligned along an imaginary path pointing directly north. "That's all we had to go on, really," says Whitaker. "We had no way of telling the size of these landmarks or the distance between them...
Using a dime-store magnifying glass given to him by a friend, Whitaker began studying photographs of roughly the same area taken from above the moon by Lunar Orbiter 3. The glass proved a valuable gift. Within 20 hours after Surveyor's landing, Whitaker located a crater with the distinctive boulder and crater pattern. Surveyor, he confidently told NASA flight planners, was on the east side of that crater. With equal confidence- based on the navigation lessons learned from the flight of Apollo 11-NASA made plans for a precision landing that would place the lunar module within walking...