Lunar Orbiter Solar Panel, 1966

3 responses to “Lunar Orbiter Solar Panel, 1966”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Jul 20, 2019 at 1:35 am

   Overall spacecraft Directional Antenna, details Sample Lunar Orbiter photo

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2. 

   Megaton15

   Mar 5, 2020 at 8:44 pm

   Speaking of early lunar images via spacecraft:

   Faxes From the Far Side
   The 1950s-era Soviet mission to first photograph the far side of the moon

   http://www.damninteresting.com/faxes-from-the-far-side/

   The Genetrix program lasted only 27 days. It had originally been planned to continue indefinitely, but president Eisenhower cancelled any further spy balloon launches due to the Soviets’ strenuous diplomatic protests. Of the 500 or so spy balloons that were launched, only about 50 camera gondolas were successfully recovered by the US Air Force. These provided over 10,000 reconnaissance photos of inland Soviet Union and China, including first peeks at nuclear and radar facilities.

   The Soviets recovered a number of the gondolas themselves, and engineers began to dissect them, seeking useful information. To their surprise, they found something inside that happened to solve a little problem they had been having with one of their upcoming space missions: temperature-resistant and radiation-hardened photographic film.

   The specialized film had been necessary in the Genetrix balloons due to the high altitudes involved—up to 100,000 feet. Soviet engineers still didn’t know how the Americans made the film, but that didn’t stop them from repurposing it for their own spacecraft. On the 4th of October 1959, forty frames of this film were nestled inside a space probe nestled atop a rocket at the Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in Kazakhstan. This space probe—or Automatic Interplanetary Station—would later come to be known as Lunik 3. It was two years to the day since the Soviets had launched Sputnik 1, history’s first artificial satellite. And less than a month prior, the Soviets had celebrated the first spacecraft to actually come into contact with the moon. That spacecraft, Lunik 2, had deliberately crashed into the moon, peppering the crash site with patriotic Soviet pennants. It would be another decade before any human set foot on the moon.

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3. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 5, 2020 at 9:47 pm

   and now Loon carries the torch 🙂

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