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Ewen Whitaker Ranger 6 went off on the day it was supposed to. I’d chosen a place in Mare Tranquillitatis where the angles would be right and it’d be free of rocks and hopefully we’d photograph some domes on the Moon as it went down. But of course Ranger 6, something went wrong with the high voltage in the spacecraft. Before it got out of the atmosphere—and of course in low-pressure atmosphere you can jump sparks long-distances—sparks must’ve jumped and burned out the cameras or something. So poor Ranger 6 never took any pictures. This was pretty sad. We were all at JPL and the launch was successful and up it went. We got there and we were all chewing our pencils waiting for the news: It’s getting near the Moon—time for camera switch-on—no news of camera switch-on. We’re getting closer to the Moon, distance to the Moon only a thousand kilometers—still no sign of warm-up, switch-on. The signals had ceased. We said, okay, the spacecraft has crashed. That was Ranger 6. All right, back to the drawing boards. They found out what they thought was the problem with the high voltage, and redesigned it slightly. The next one was Ranger 7. I got this call from Gene Shoemaker once again: “Please find places for Ranger 7 to land.” The third day of launch would’ve been the best one, and that was the one that was chosen. It went off because the weather was good, and finally got there and everything went fine—Yes, we’ve got camera turn-on! We were all at JPL, there was Urey, and Kuiper, and me, of course all the JPL engineers and everything; it was a big whoopee-do. |
There were no pictures coming back live, we couldn’t see anything, but we could hear the signal from the cameras, just a tone coming in, signaling that the video was coming in. It was being recorded out in the Mojave Desert there, one of the tracking stations. So that was that, and of course it was hey, hey, popping champagne and everything. But of course we hadn’t got the films. They had to be stored, put in a truck and driven down from the Mojave Desert which was a hundred-and-some miles away, so we didn’t get them for quite a long time. Then we got these things and they started printing out of pictures from them, and we got the first few prints—Oh, look at this, wow, you can see these craters! Of course the thing’s photographing as it came in closer and closer, just a solid series of pictures from all these six cameras, and so the view that you got closer and closer all the time. The press conference was going to be that day, so I think we were all up 26 hours without any sleep. Anyway, Kuiper was on it: “This is a great day for science and a great day for the United States,” and a big whoopee-do and everything. That was very exciting. Then I went back to England, but I had a two-week stay over here because we got all the negatives of the films—35 millimeter films, just like you put into your camera, but very long films—and then I chose a selection of things and printed up all these negatives. Oh, I tell you, two weeks of solid darkroom work. We got back to Tucson eventually and we had five months of writing out experimenter’s reports, so that meant looking at all these pictures and coming up with our theories. It was really an exciting time but very busy. |
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