Then the original film was dried, cut, and scanned to create an electrical signal that could be sent back to Earth. The imaging system included two lenses - an 80-millimeter lens for wide-angle photography and a 610-millimeter lens for high-resolution photography - and exposed strips of 70-millimeter Kodak aerial film held in place against a pane of glass by clamps and vacuum.Īfter exposure, NASA developed the film by pressing it against Kodak Bimat transfer film presoaked in processing solution. NASAįilm photography, processing, and transmission was a complicated mechanical dance given the electronics available at the time of Lunar Orbiter 1. “To me, this is one of the most ingenious, Rube Goldberg-esque imaging systems we’ve ever used.”Ī photograph of the moon taken by Lunar Orbiter III in 1967. While the Ranger vehicles used television cameras to transmit images from the Moon, Lunar Orbiter would use an Eastman Kodak film camera initially developed by the National Reconnaissance Office for the Samos E-1 spy satellite.īut unlike the spy satellites, which Shindell said would drop their exposed film from orbit to be collected with special baskets by aircraft for processing, NASA “developed this really ingenious method of developing the film and then scanning the film inside the spacecraft, sent back via a video signal,” he says. The flying photo lab - Lunar Orbiter 1 was also innovative in its imaging. In terms of planning Apollo, this mission was incredibly important.” “They used that to study 20 potential Apollo landing sites. “From those, you had 99 percent coverage of the entire Moon’s surface,” Shindell said. The Lunar Orbiters, beginning with Lunar Orbiter 1, aimed to map the entire Moon, ultimately taking more than 3,000 photographs. beating the USSR to the Moon with the Apollo missions.įirst, there was an entirely different design and scope of mission for the Lunar Orbiter program compared to previous probes, which had only taken photos of specific areas of the Moon. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was making America look bad, but the Soviet Union definitely had the first success.”īut Lunar Orbiter 1 wasn’t just a step-wise success in the space race - it forged new technological ground and laid the foundation for the U.S. and the Soviet Union were kind of neck and neck in this,” Matt Shindell, curator of the National Air and Space Museum’s space history department, tells Inverse. The first image of the moon taken by a U.S. had already lost key firsts to the Soviet Union: The USSR had made the first lunar soft landing in February 1966 with its Luna 9 vehicle, while Luna 10 became the first successful orbiter of the moon in April 1966. soft landing on the Moon in June of 1966, the U.S.
LUNAR RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER TV
While the Ranger 7 through 9 missions had returned live TV images of the Moon before those probes completed their planned impact on the lunar surface in 1964 and ’65, and the Surveyor 1 mission had made the first U.S. Neck and neck in the space race - The U.S. And along the way, they took some of the first space images to take the public’s breath away and set the standard by which scientists would conduct robotic planetary science in subsequent decades. While Lunar Orbiter 1 was in many ways eclipsed by the later crewed Apollo missions, the orbiter - and the four subsequent Lunar Orbiter missions - were essential to Apollo’s success. Four days later, it became the first U.S. On August 10, 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to begin a massive photographic survey of the lunar surface.
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