50 years ago, on the way to the Moon…
The Surveyors were a series of robotic landers designed to make softlandings on the Moon to study lunar surface properties and to act as scouts for future human landings. Surveyor 5 launched on September 8, 1967, and landed on the Moon three days later in the Sea of Tranquility, an area then under consideration as an Apollo landing site. Indeed, Apollo 11 landed about 25 km away less than two years later. By the time its mission ended on December 17, 1967, Surveyor 5 had returned over 19,000 pictures and studied the chemical composition of the lunar surface. During this time, the hardy spacecraft survived three cold lunar nights, and on October 18 it took thermal measurements during a total solar eclipse, which was seen as a total lunar eclipse on Earth. Surveyor 5 brought NASA one step closer to the Moon.
For more on the Surveyor program, please visit https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/surveyor.html