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| Early Days Gerard Kuiper Early Graduate Students Telescopes & Research |
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Ranger Program | Lunar Orbiter | Apollo | Postcards of Home |
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Ewen Whitaker With Surveyor 1 was on Gene Shoemaker’s team. We were in charge of the cameras, what they would photograph. With the first Surveyor, they tracked it down and it photographed all the flat areas, the panoramas. But on the horizon there were little bright peaks. They knew roughly where they were on the Moon, in Flamsteed P. The people at JPL and others, they figured out the place the thing had landed, because of the way the peaks looked. This was their theory and they published it in Science. I looked at this and thought, “I don’t know, that doesn’t sound right to me.” So I did a real job, I got some better pictures from JPL. They sent them to me of the mountains that you could see in this little piece of the panorama, and I got one of our best pictures—we’d taken it with the 82-inch in Texas—and sort of straightened it up and did the angles. I figured out where this had to be on the floor of this Flamsteed P flat area so that the angles of the peaks that you were seeing fitted in with what we saw from our Earth-based picture. |
Well, that didn’t agree with what they’d written up in Science, so I had to look and see what were the two things the Surveyor radar caught as it was landing, and lo and behold, looking around, there were two very bright little tiny craters. I thought, Oh-oh, I betcha those were the two things that caused the blips in the radar, and therefore from that you could see where the thing had landed. So I said that Surveyor was right about here. Once they photographed it, it was almost exactly where I predicted from the two craters—very close, within a hundred yards or something. We found out later that Orbiter 1 had actually photographed this thing with its low-resolution camera. You could just pick out a bright spot. Well, then they said, “You’re the one who’s going to find out where these things land in the future,” so that got me that little job, amongst others of course. That was exciting days with all the Surveyors. |
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