Posted by Ray Katz in current, history, moon
Old photo of moon shows 1966 lander
Surveyor: It's the little white bump in the picture
Surveyor 1, an unmanned American spacecraft, landed on the moon in June 1966. It landed in the Ocean of Storms, which later became the landing site of Apollo 12. As you may recall, the Apollo 12 moonwalkers visited another Surveyor (# 3) during their trip in November 1969.
In any case, in 1967 another craft, Lunar Orbiter III, took a “high resolution” photo of the Surveyor. (Well, a 1967 version of high resolution anyway.)
That photo has been recovered and published—using the original tape drives from that time. (Somebody first restored those old hard drives.)
This is all part of an ongoing project. The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has been hard at work recovering and preserving “lost” high resolution photos from the 1969s.
With a new probe, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, now taking high resolution photos of the moon, including Apollo landing sites, these old recovered photos may ultimately serve historical value…and less scientific value.
Still, I love history and it’s amazing what our spacecraft did back in the 1960s.
