|
|
|
| Early Days Gerard Kuiper Early Graduate Students Telescopes & Research |
Lunar Orbiter | Surveyor I | Apollo | Postcards of Home |
1 | 2 | 3 |
Charles Wood There was a sequence of a wide-angled view and then closer, so a smaller area being seen. The thing we realized was, my gosh, there were craters everywhere. The most close-up picture that we had, there were still craters everywhere. And my job was measuring craters, and I thought, my god, this is never going to end. There’s going to be continuing stuff to do here. Guy Consolmagno The thrilling thing was not just seeing the Moon coming at you—because they had the first picture, the next picture closer up, the next picture close up—but below they said, “Live from the Moon.” Steve Larson At that time I was working in the darkroom. We got the first high resolution images of the surface of the Moon from this crash-landing spacecraft. After many tries, they finally got a couple to work. It was all very exciting, because we were trying to extract as much information as possible just from imaging, and there was a lot of contention at the time about whether or not the surface was even strong enough to sustain the landing of a spacecraft. Some people predicted this was a very loose, powdery thing that would just swallow it up when we tried to land. |
Charles Wood Kuiper got time on the Kitt Peak 84-inch telescope and Alika Herring and I went up to see the impact of Ranger 9, because there had been some suggestion that the Moon had a lot of dust on it, and there might be a large cloud of dust from the impact. So we got to use this really large telescope to look at the Moon with our eyeballs. Almost nobody, then or now, looks at the Moon with a large telescope with their eyeballs. I remember the stability of the atmosphere for seconds would be very good, and we could see tiny, tiny craters on the Moon that no one had ever seen before. They had never been photographed before. It was just very exciting. And when the spacecraft hit—we had the radio on; we could hear when it hit—there was absolutely nothing. That showed us and anybody else who was concerned that no, there wasn’t a huge amount of dust on the Moon. |
| Directory | LARS | LPL Library | LPL WebMail | Webmaster | ||
Department of Planetary Sciences Lunar and Planetary Laboratory 1629 E. University Blvd. Tucson AZ 85721 Copyright © 2008 Arizona Board of Regents |