Surveyor Test Article
The three tin foil bowls on the end of the lower arms indicate that this space vehicle has feet and is intended to land somewhere. This is reinforced by the fully-extended digger arm (surface sampler arm in NASA-speak) that today hangs even lower.
The Surveyor programme was run by NASA from June 1966 to January 1968, sending seven robotic spacecraft to the surface of the Moon. Seen above is a test article, a full-scale mock-up, which is now suspended from the ceiling in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington DC.
The programme's primary goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of soft landings on the Moon. The Surveyor craft were the first American spacecraft to achieve soft landing on an extraterrestrial body. The missions called for the craft to travel directly to the Moon on an impact trajectory, a journey that lasted 63-65 hours, and ended with a deceleration of just over three minutes to a soft landing.
The programme was implemented by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to prepare for the Apollo programme. JPL selected Hughes Aircraft to develop the spacecraft system which was launched into space aboard an Atlas-Centaur rocket. The total cost of the Surveyor programme was officially $469 million.
Five of the Surveyor craft successfully soft-landed on the moon, including the first one. The other two failed: Surveyor 2 crashed at high velocity after a failed mid-course correction, and Surveyor 4 was lost to contact (possibly exploding) 2.5 minutes before its scheduled touch-down.
All seven spacecraft are still on the Moon; none of the missions included returning them to Earth. Some parts of Surveyor 3 were returned to Earth by the crew of Apollo 12, which landed near it in 1969. The camera from this craft is also on display at the National Air and Space Museum.
There is no sense of scale in the picture, but the whole craft is 3m high and 3.5m wide. Its sisters weighed 283 kg as they landed on the moon.
Surveyor Test Article
The three tin foil bowls on the end of the lower arms indicate that this space vehicle has feet and is intended to land somewhere. This is reinforced by the fully-extended digger arm (surface sampler arm in NASA-speak) that today hangs even lower.
The Surveyor programme was run by NASA from June 1966 to January 1968, sending seven robotic spacecraft to the surface of the Moon. Seen above is a test article, a full-scale mock-up, which is now suspended from the ceiling in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington DC.
The programme's primary goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of soft landings on the Moon. The Surveyor craft were the first American spacecraft to achieve soft landing on an extraterrestrial body. The missions called for the craft to travel directly to the Moon on an impact trajectory, a journey that lasted 63-65 hours, and ended with a deceleration of just over three minutes to a soft landing.
The programme was implemented by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to prepare for the Apollo programme. JPL selected Hughes Aircraft to develop the spacecraft system which was launched into space aboard an Atlas-Centaur rocket. The total cost of the Surveyor programme was officially $469 million.
Five of the Surveyor craft successfully soft-landed on the moon, including the first one. The other two failed: Surveyor 2 crashed at high velocity after a failed mid-course correction, and Surveyor 4 was lost to contact (possibly exploding) 2.5 minutes before its scheduled touch-down.
All seven spacecraft are still on the Moon; none of the missions included returning them to Earth. Some parts of Surveyor 3 were returned to Earth by the crew of Apollo 12, which landed near it in 1969. The camera from this craft is also on display at the National Air and Space Museum.
There is no sense of scale in the picture, but the whole craft is 3m high and 3.5m wide. Its sisters weighed 283 kg as they landed on the moon.