[Moonbase-discuss] Ranger 7

[JonAlexandr@aol.com]

Thoughts at night.  --Jon

The New York Times online has a feature called "On This Day", which recounts 
what happened on any particular day in years past as reported -- mostly -- in 
The New York Times.  This particular quiet night I was drawn into the 
front-page story of Ranger 7, a spacecraft that transmitted the first high-resolution 
images of the lunar surface before impacting it on July 31, 1964.  Its success 
followed what had been a depressing string of spacecraft failures in the 
prior six years.

I remember being fascinated by the Ranger 7 spacecraft and its historic 
pictures as a young teenager.  (I even have a scrapbook showing pictures relayed by 
Ranger 7 side-by-side with generic images of electronic components of 
decreasing size, suggesting the approach of a 'micro' spacecraft to an infinitely 
detailed electronic circuit.)  The Ranger 7 story may also have been the first in 
which I had read something about the 'impact scientist' Eugene Shoemaker (who 
ultimately died by impact), as I know that I was then already reading The New 
York Times fairly often.

Reading the Ranger 7 story tonight, I recall having the same feelings as I 
had more recently when a spacecraft that had been orbiting an asteroid for over 
a year was brought to a successful landing with the asteroid's surface*.  The 
increasing resolution of the images of the asteroid's surface as the 
spacecraft neared was very much like the increasing resolution of the pictures of the 
Moon's surface as relayed by Ranger 7.

In less than eighteen months the European-built Huygens probe, to be deployed 
from the NASA-built Cassini Saturn orbiter, is scheduled to recapitulate this 
kind of drama when it enters the surface-obscuring atmosphere of Titan, the 
largest moon of Saturn.  Assuming (and hoping) that both spacecraft function 
properly, I wonder what we will see.  I suspect that it will be even more 
interesting than what Ranger 7 showed us almost forty years ago.  --Jon

Ranger 7, NYT, July 31, 1964:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20030731.html

Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn-Titan:
http://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/sat_missns/sat-cassini.html

More about the Cassini-Huygens mission:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

* The spacecraft "NEAR" (Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) landed on asteroid 
Eros in February 2001.  The spacecraft was not designed for landing, but 
mission engineers and scientists thought that there was a good chance for additional 
useful data if the landing could be accomplished -- and they succeeded.

For more information about NEAR, see:
http://near.jhuapl.edu/