
The high-gain antenna dish was used to send the first high-res photos of the moon back to Earth. This is Serial Number 5.
Before Apollo, the U.S. flew robotic satellites around the moon with an ingenious analog film imaging system — long before digital cameras. The film was moved during exposure to compensate for the spacecraft velocity, which was estimated by an electro-optical sensor. The film had to be developed onboard the satellite in the onboard dark room (since the satellite would not return to Earth). The film was then raster scanned with a 6.5 micron beam and transmitted back to Earth with the dish antenna. (see diagrams on this in the comments below)
The Lunar Orbiter program consisted of five Lunar Orbiters which returned photography of 99% of the surface of the Moon (near and far side) with resolution down to 1 meter. Altogether the Orbiters returned 2180 high resolution and 882 medium resolution frames.
In the frame is a high resolution image recovered from Lunar Orbiter tape storage by Dennis Wingo in a pirate McDonalds at NASA Ames. It came from Lunar Orbiter IV in 1967, a full frame of 70mm film (details and annotations below).
From Dennis Wingo: "Lunar Orbiter IV was the fourth of the five lunar orbiters flown by NASA in support of the Apollo program and planetary science beginning in August of 1966 through August of 1967. The first three Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were successful in their photo reconnaissance mission to identify the first Apollo lunar landing sites, thus LO-IV was retargeted to a high lunar polar orbit in order to map the majority of the Moon’s surface at moderate resolution of between 80-140 meters. Due to the use of photographic film in the high resolution camera the full images are very long relative to their width. In order to facilitate computer storage and limitations in photographic equipment, the high resolution "frames" were subdivided into three subframes. Figure 1 shows where LO-IV-165H was taken with respect to the lunar coordinate system:
Figure 1 above shows the overlay of the entire frame with the three "subframes" split. The picture in the frame here was a special print provided to the U.S. Geological Service scientists who were identifying lunar selenography (the geography of the Moon). Lunar craters and other features are named for famous scientists, philosophers, and of course politicians. The blackened section in figure 1 left shows subframe LOV-165-H3. Figure 1 center shows the location of subframe LOV-165-H2. Figure 1 right shows the location of LOV-165-H1. Thus the images are of the western limb (to the right as seen from Earth). From the Earth we can see to almost +90 degrees and so a bit of the image shows the lunar far side. 







This antenna is S/N 005 of RCA Part Number 1723200-501 under contract
Boeing built 8 Lunar Orbiters, 5 for flight and 3 for ground test. #6 is in the Smithsonian. Here is a visual of the thermal/vacuum test rig:
And a diagram of how the Lunar Orbiter took the first famous 

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