The last of the Surveyor series
The Hindu
Launched on January 7, 1968, the Surveyor 7 was a lunar unmanned lander that successfully landed on the lunar surface on January 10. The last of the original series of Surveyor moon landers of the 1960s. Surveyor 7 was the only spacecraft of the series that landed in the lunar highland region. A.S.Ganesh takes a look at Surveyor 7 – the only purely scientific mission in the series…
With the objective of landing human beings on the moon, NASA worked on various issues through the 1960s. The decade saw spectacular progress being made as we understood our natural satellite better than ever before.
First, the Lunar Orbiter series had flown five successful missions in five attempts, meeting its objective of mapping potential landing sites for the early Apollo missions and in fact mapping almost the entire lunar surface. The Surveyor landing missions, meanwhile, enjoyed four successes (1, 3, 5, and 6) in the first six attempts, providing the Apollo programme with ground-truth data.