What Happened on the Moon Before Apollo ?

The Apollo landings from 1969 to 1972 marked a high point in lunar exploration but Apollo didn't just rock up onto the moon out of a blue, it took many many missions by probes and Landers over the preceding years to establish if we could send men to the moon and get them back again. It's quite strange to think that even by the late 1950s just over ten years before Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface, we knew surprisingly little about the moon other than what we could observe from the earth from the hypotheses we could draw from those observations. We knew but it had no appreciable atmosphere or large bodies of water but we didn't know what the surface was like and we didn't know what was on the far, side beside which always faces away from Earth. After the launch of Sputnik on October 4th 1957 the Soviets made several attempts at getting a probe to the moon. The first three launches in September, October and December of 1958 all failed but the fourth one in January 1959 did work but they missed the moon and lunar 1 became the first spacecraft to escape Earth's gravity and enter orbit around the Sun. After another launch failure in June in September 1959, Luna 2 became the first man-made object to reach the surface of the moon. These probes would not like the Landers we are used to now, they were impactors which meant they were designed to crash into the surface taking measurements on the way. During the journey to the moon lunar 2 took measurements approximately once a minute and these were transmitted back to earth up until the point of impact. Luna 2's instruments also helped prove that the moon had no real magnetic field and also confirm the existence of the Van Allen belt which had been discovered by the first U.S. satellite Explorer 1, it also released a vapor cloud with bright orange sodium gas that expanded up to 400 miles, 650 kilometres across which could be seen by telescopes on earth. The US was skeptical of the Soviets and didn't believe that they had reached the moon that was until Bernard Lovell at the Jodrell Bank radio telescope in England using the Doppler method proved that the signals did indeed come from the moon. Once again the US had been caught out by the Soviets who used Luna 2 and Sputnik as propaganda to show the superiority of the Soviet space program but closest the US had come to the moon by then was Pioneer 4 which only gotten into 37,000 miles or 60,000 kilometers. Luna 2 also proved that the impactor method work and this would also be used by the later U.S. Ranger probes. Then in October 1959 the Soviet did it again with Luna 3 when it became the first spacecraft to photograph the far side of the Moon Luna 3 was also the first craft not only to use the gravity assist method to swing it around the moon and back to the earth but also to position itself in space using three axis control with thrusters. This was essential to control the spin of a craft and also to position the camera towards the lunar surface. The photographic film that was used the images of a moon was high temperature, radiation hardened film which ironically had been captured from American Genetrix balloons which the U.S. used as high-altitude surveillance devices in effect they will be original spies in the sky before high altitude planes and satellites they would float over the Soviet Union taking pictures before being intercepted by the US Air Force once out of Soviet airspace. However the Soviets found a way to shoot them down and capture your equipment onboard, although the Soviets didn't know how to make the film at the time they found a very good use for it in Luna 3. The pictures were transferred from a photographic film in the Luna 3 satellite and transmitted it back to earth using a method similar to a fax machine. The images were very basic but showed that the far side of the Moon was quite different to the side facing earth. With Kennedy's announcements of the Apollo missions and the eight year deadline to get a man onto the moon by the end of a decade, it meant that the U.S. had their work cut out to find suitable landing sites and working out if the surface was safe to land on as there was some speculation by some in NASA that the lander could sink into the lunar dust. To get close up images the lunar surface, the latter part of a Range program will be used. These probes would use the impactor method that the Soviet Luna 2 of pioneered. The program will be done in three blocks or phases with the first block of ranges 1 & 2 testing the systems without actually trying for the moon the following ranges in blocks 2 & 3 or were aimed at the moon. But things didn't get off to a good start with Rangers 1 through 6 failing through a variety of reasons from launch failures to missing the moon completely. At one point it was called the "shoot and hope program". It wasn't until the block three missions that they had the first successes with Rangers 7,8 and 9 working as planned. The block three Ranger probes had six TV cameras fitted to them each with different lenses, fields of views, exposure settings and scan rates. During the final few seconds of the flight at a height of around around 600 meters the images captured were a thousand times better than could be obtained from earth-based telescopes with the TV images being transmitted back to earth live until the probe impacted the surface. In all 17,100 images of a lunar surface were sent back to NASA including the area where Apollo 11 would land some four and a bit years later. Due to the high failure rate of the earlier Ranger missions the next stage which was the send robotic probes was brought forward to conduct tests to see if it was possible to land on the moon and to get a close-up look at the composition of the lunar soil or regolith. But once again the Soviets just pipped the U.S. to the post with the first soft landing of Luna 9 on the 3rd of February 1966. Although it wasn't the first time the Soviets had tried, luna 9 being their 12th attempt at a soft landing on the moon. Whilst Luna 9 was a soft landing it was a simple system with the lander part ejecting up and away from the main craft just before impact. The sphere-shaped Lander had an inflatable balloon to cushion it as it fell the short distance back to the surface once he settled the sphere opened with four petals which orientated it to the correct position. Luna 9 also had a TV camera which sent back the first panoramic images of the surface these were intercepted by the Jodrell Bank radio telescope and leaked to the press in the West before the Soviets published them. This landing also proved that a craft would not sink into the lunar dust as was thought by some. On the 2nd June 1966, four months after the landing of the Soviet Luna 9, Surveyor 1 the first of the U.S. Landers touched down on the lunar surface. The surveyor Landers were built not only to demonstrate the feasibility of a soft lunar landing but also to test the closed-loop control system of the radar guided descent with throttle-able engines in the space environment similar to those that would be used in the later Apollo Landers. The landing control was more sophisticated than the Soviet Luna 9 with the final descent being controlled by a doppler radar and three vernier thruster engines and it landed upright on three outstretched legs. The Surveyors were fitted with TV cameras and other sensors and some incorporated an extendable arm which could grab and test soil samples. In all seven Surveyor Landers were sent to the moon with five of them making successful landings. Apollo 12 later landed about 600 meters from Surveyor 3 and several other parts from the Surveyor craft, including the TV camera were brought back to earth by the Apollo 12 crew for examination to see how they survived on the lunar surface for the past few years. To help select the Apollo landing sites NASA also used the Lunar Orbiter program, it consisted of five missions in 1966 to 67. In all these lunar satellites photograph 99% of the moon's surface down to a resolution of 1 meter or 3 feet, returning 2188 high-res images an 882 medium res images to earth by radio. They also monitored radiation levels and in micro meteor impacts with the results confirming that the design of the Apollo craft would protect crew for the time that they will be on the moon. After the missions were over the lunar orbiters were crashed into the surface of the moon. The Soviets continued to send lunar orbiters with Luna 10, 11, 12, 14. Luna 13 was the only other Lander up until the Apollo 11 mission. In the culmination of the moon race and as a last moment attempt to get a lunar soil sample back to earth before Apollo 11, the Soviet Luna 15 which had been launched three days before Apollo made its descent to the moon's surface, just as Aldrin and Armstrong were making their preparations for Apollo 11 to lift off and head back to earth. It's not known exactly what happened but radio contact was lost with Luna 15 four minutes after de-orbiting at an altitude of about 3 kilometers with the most probable explanation being but it had crashed into a mountain range during the descent. Even if it had have landed successfully and gathered its all samples Apollo 11 would still have made it back to earth before Luna 15. On August the 22nd 1976, almost four years after the final Apollo 17 mission the last soviet lunar craft Luna 24 landed successfully and returned 170 grams or 6 ounces of lunar samples back to earth and the moon lay silent for a further 37 years before the Chinese Cheng'e 3 lander and its rover returned to the moon surface in 2013. So as always thanks for watching and please subscribe, rate and share.

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 1,169,395

Keywords: moon, lunar mission, luna-1, luna-2, luna-3, ranger probes, nasa, surveyor 1, luna-15, luna-24, before apollo, apollo 12, apollo 11, sputnik, joderell bank, bernard lovell, pioneer 4, Chang'e 3, jade rabbit rover, lunar surface, space, space race, moon race, apollo, lunar, curious-droid.com, rocket, moon rock, what happened on the moon?, ranger program, surveyor program, paul shillito

Id: HoKvj5GMZL0

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017