Category: Planetary Science

“Standing By”: Science Communication on Apollo 8

On By invertingvisionIn Astronomy, Geology, History, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Lunar Robotics, Photography, Planetary Science, Robotics, Space ExplorationLeave a comment

This morning, as I sipped my coffee, I took in the view of a crescent Earth from the perspective of astronauts heading toward the Moon. It’s the first time this has been possible in over 50 years. Yesterday, as I awaited the launch of Artemis II, I watched the CBS broadcast of Apollo 8, in which Walter Cronkite guided America through the very first time this sort of journey was made in 1968.

Throughout the broadcast, Cronkite regularly broke away from the action to talk to leading scientists. Viewers were taken to Jodrell Bank observatory in England, where the eminent astronomer Bernard Lovell sat with a CBS reporter, a radio telescope looming behind them. Then to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where American geologist Eugene Shoemaker sat beside a giant lunar globe, excitedly answering questions.

Left image: CBS reporter Morley Safer, left, interviews Bernard Lovell, right. Right image: Eugene Shoemaker, left, is interviewed by CBS reporter Terry Drinkwater, right

Scientists had a complex relationship with Apollo. Many scientists at the time looked at the price tag for the “man-in-space” program, and couldn’t help but imagine how many scientific robots could have been constructed and sent across the solar system with those dollars. Some were extremely vocal about this, to the frustration of NASA officials. Many scientists were concerned that science was being misused to legitimize missions that had dubious scientific value. But others agreed with NASA’s arguments that Apollo was an important part of selling a space program and enabling long-term access to space. And others still were genuinely excited about the possibility of doing field work on the Moon.


Apollo 8 in particular had limited scientific value, but science featured heavily in the broadcast nevertheless. This may have been exactly the sort of “science-washing” that worried so many scientists. But Lovell and Shoemaker had the opportunity to explain the exact limitations of Apollo 8 to the CBS audience themselves. In doing so, they highlighted the work of lunar robotics teams that preceded the Apollo missions, and explained the questions that future Apollo missions might help to answer. Missions that Apollo 8 would enable.

Below, you will find quotes from these interviews, with my quick analysis. To keep this post short(ish), I have tried to limit my descriptions to things I find most interesting or relevant. If you’re interested, I highly recommend watching the entire clips. They are a fascinating look back at science communication during our first trip around the Moon.

Note: Many thanks you to the anonymous person who uploaded all this archival footage. I’m not linking all of it in this post–in part to avoid clutter and limit length, but you can find the clips by a search (for CBS Apollo 8 footage), or find the links here: https://bsky.app/profile/inverting-vision.bsky.social/post/3mihebmpves23

Being interested in lunar robotics, I was looking to see how the robots would show up, especially Lunar Orbiter. Not long after the launch, Cronkite cut to Terry Drinkwater reporting from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, which built and operated some of the robots.

Drinkwater reports that people watching the launch at JPL are “thinking back to all that has gone on here in unmanned exploration of the Moon.” Then he takes the audience on a whirlwind tour of the Pioneer, Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. They show models of each vehicle, and images they produced, discussing how each contributed to science and Apollo planning.

An illustration of the three major lunar robots sent to the Moon by NASA. From a 1966 NASA press kit (PDF)

Later, they cut to an interview with Bernard Lovell. Lovell was director of the Jodrell Bank observatory in England, which had a fascinating role in early lunar exploration. They used their telescope to track the first robotic lunar missions, even intercepting image transmissions from Soviet lunar probes. Lovell was very straightforward about the limited scientific value of Apollo 8. “The orbiters and the landers have already given us a very great deal of scientific information about the nature of the lunar terrain and the constitution of the surface,” he said, explaining that “for a really significant addition to that knowledge, we will have to wait until the Apollo ship actually lands men on the Moon, and that really would be terribly exciting…”

When Apollo 8 arrived at the Moon, astronaut Jim Lovell began narrating what he saw from the spacecraft. He described a grey lunar surface that looked like plaster-of-paris. After their report, Cronkite brought in “Doc Shoemaker,” who sat in JPL next to a massive lunar globe, wearing his bolo tie. Shoemaker was one of the foremost of the new generation of geologists interested in taking their field work to the Moon.

Cronkite replayed Lovell’s description, inviting Shoemaker to “point to those spots on the Moon” as Lovell described them. Shoemaker silently points to the Sea of Tranquility as Lovell says that the mare “doesn’t stand out as well here as it does back on Earth.” Doc Shoemaker then points to the surrounding craters as Lovell begins talking about them. It’s really delightful, and having a human expert directly point out these features on a map adds something that animations don’t quite capture. I know that there were people watching at the time who still remember Shoemaker’s appearance, and it influenced their career direction.

“You did that one so well, you won your audition,” Cronkite says to Shoemaker. Then he starts asking Shoemaker about orbits, discussing gravitational pull and its relationship to orbital speeds. They introduce the ideas of “pericynthion”–the part of a lunar orbit passing closest to the Moon–and “apocynthion,” the point of an orbit farthest from the Moon. Cronkite mentions that the “Cynthus” part of those terms refers to an old name for the Moon. Shoemaker corrects him, claiming that those terms are actually more generalized, for the orbit of any smaller body around a larger body.

Today, the generalized terms usually used are periapsis and apoapsis. But Cynthus is an interesting Greek term. Appropriately, it was sometimes used as a name for Artemis, because the Greek goddess was by legend born on Mount Cynthus. Artemis was very much associated with Selene, goddess of the Moon. Any satellite of another body can be considered a “moon,” and the term “moon” was used that way even into the 60s, so its usage as a general term is also plausible. But Shoemaker was a geologist who was relatively new to spaceflight, so he could have been mistaken. My understanding is that these terms did in fact primarily refer to lunar orbits during Apollo, and that Cronkite was right here.

Regardless, Cronkite concedes. “Well I had one correct fact out of four there, that’s not bad, batting .250 on the apo…pericynthion.”

As the astronauts flew around the Moon, they cut back to Bernard Lovell again. This interview is particularly charming. While Lovell, a very distinguished scientist, was fairly even-keeled in earlier interviews, he is now visibly excited. Or at least, I think, as visibly excited as an old English astronomer can get.

He was apparently repeating “fantastic, utterly fantastic,” according to CBS reporter Morley Safer. Then Lovell gives his reflection:

“I must confess this is really one of the great moments…it’s very hard to believe that there are human beings actually flying around the Moon and giving this description of what they see. I don’t know if other people are like I am over this, but although as a scientist I have seen the photographs of the Moon so often, through so many telescopes, and more recently, these marvelous photographs sent back by the cameras. It still really almost bewilders me to try to understand that now at this moment we’ve been listening to a human being there giving these descriptions of what the volcanoes look like…”

There are several points at which Shoemaker talks Cronkite and the audience through things that the astronauts are seeing. At one point, they get confused by the fact that astronauts are talking about craters with names that are suspiciously familiar.


“I don’t find [those craters] on my Moon map here: Carr, Miller, Borman, Houston, Collins,” Cronkite reports. “They sound like they’re named after a bunch of people at the Houston manned space center to me, and I wonder how they do get these names, and how long they’ve been named that, and whether or not these fellas are going to name a few for the first time…”

Shoemaker was also befuddled. The astronauts were near the far side of the Moon, and he realizes what happened:

“[they] actually were just off the edge…of the globe…this is Mare Smythii, which was mentioned…a number of the craters they mentioned have no formal names yet–they’re back around the edge of this model, and cannot be seen from the Earth. They have been recorded on the unmanned Lunar Orbiter photographs, but no formal names have been attached. Since they have to have some kind of handle to be talked about, the astronauts have just given them names, and of course it’s fun to use the names that are most familiar, the names of your comrades in this kind of work. So I was a little puzzled too, I didn’t know what those names were, but it soon became apparent that these were the ones that had just been adopted for the mission.”

Mare Smythii and surrounding craters, as seen from Apollo 16. From Wikimedia.

Then he gets to describe the International Astronomical Union, and their naming processes, to the audience, bringing them into the world of space nomenclature.

He mentioned the Lunar Orbiter photographs there, which get a lot of air time. In other portions of the broadcast, they cut back to pre-recorded videos with the astronauts talking about their mission. In one, Bill Anders, the primary photographer on the mission, talks about their photographic objectives.

“The Orbiter photography was very good,” he explains, “but where the Orbiter photography was not so good, because the Orbiter was in  highly elliptical orbit…we hope to improve on that…”

Then Shoemaker talks Lunar Orbiter, holding up a far-side image. Unfortunately, the recording on Youtube cuts out here.

But my favorite part is a recording of Jim Lovell talking about their flight path, using a Lunar Orbiter photograph of the Sea of Tranquility. He describes landmarks in detail, making analogies to explain the scale to the audience, like the length of the runway at Ellington Air Force base. 

Jim Lovell holds up a Lunar Orbiter photograph

“You already talk like you’ve flown it and seen it,” the reporter interviewing him says.

“Yeah, this area has become quite familiar to me…I know it quite well,” Lovell replies.

Then Cronkite cuts in: “Jim Lovell, who ‘knows it quite well.’ He hadn’t been to it before, but such is the study and the training of these astronauts that he felt he did.”

To me it speaks to the power of the Lunar Orbiter images. I think a lot about the telepresence sometimes created by the use of remote sensing technology for exploration. While a visceral sense of telepresence was fairly limited in early lunar robotics, there are often little moments where you catch a glimmer of it. This is one of them. 

Lunar Orbiter V, Frame 52M. From LOIRP in National Archives.

I am reasonably certain that Lovell is holding a cropped and annotated annotated version of the Lunar Orbiter photograph above, taken on Lunar Orbiter V. If so, he gets some of the details wrong. For example, he mentions a “half-hidden” crater that he refers to as “Maskelyne B” off the edge of the picture. It’s really Maskelyne F, seen just to the right of the rectangular artifact in the middle of the full image. Maskelyne B is actually visible in the image he’s holding (in the upper central portion of the frame, behind the large crater, which is Maskelyne).

Honestly, I don’t fault him for making mistakes. The astronauts spent time under the guidance of scientists studying these images, but it was a pretty wild crash course. For Apollo 8, the goal was for them to be able to identify photographic targets. It was more important to visually recognize targets than to be able to accurately name them. But this was all part of the show–using science to convey a sense of exploration and to legitimize the project. The astronauts had to become something like amateur science communicators themselves.

And in fact, the Apollo 8 astronauts produced many spectacular images, like this one showing the central peak of the far side crater Tsiolkovsky:

The central peak of Tsiolkovsky from Apollo 8. From Wikimedia.

Later in the clip, they cut to Shoemaker again, who describes their flight path and some of these photographic objectives. There was real science to be done here, however limited. Science communication like this, even if it is flawed, can often serve very important ends for a community hoping to create excitement and support for their research.

Robert Jastrow, an astronomer and NASA official, also makes a couple appearances. He does a good job of explaining some of the overall scientific objectives of lunar exploration, and the findings of the robotic missions thus far. One of the biggest questions that needed answering was the age and origin of the Moon.

“The information returned by spacecraft has answered some questions in that connection,” Jastrow explains, “but raised as many as it’s answered…”

Robert Jastrow. From Wikimedia.

They talk about the scientific return of Apollo 8, and Jastrow, like Bernard Lovell, frames it as a stepping stone towards the real scientific return expected from a landing.

Jastrow then talks through some Lunar Orbiter photographs with Cronkite.  “It’s a fairly new crater,” he says, holding up an Orbiter photo, “an expert like Gene Shoemaker would have to tell us exactly how old it is…” He mentions Meteor Crater in Arizona, talking about how scientists identify the difference between new and old craters. Shoemaker had done extensive work at Meteor Crater in his attempt to understand lunar cratering.

In one appearance with Jastrow, Cronkite asks jokingly whether the Moon is made out of green cheese, teeing up Jastrow to talk about Surveyor and its findings about lunar composition. 

At the beginning of the video after this one, Jastrow and Cronkite talk about the capabilities of astronauts vs. robots. Jastrow makes the claim that a robot would be more expensive, but I think this probably relies on the assumption of a robot that could match the generalized capabilities of a human. Certainly the capabilities of robots in the 60s meant that humans had a bigger advantage over robots than nowadays–but even then, a great deal could be done with robots for a relatively low cost, which is exactly the source of much Apollo skepticism in the scientific community.

At the end, Jastrow and Cronkite talk about Mars.

Of course, this was happening in 1968, amid a great deal of turmoil across the country and the world. In a special report summarizing Apollo 8, Cronkite framed the contrast with characteristic eloquence:

“A year of trouble and turbulence, anger and assassination, is now coming to an end in incandescent triumph…”

https://www.c-span.org/clip/reel-america/user-clip-cronkite-introduction-to-apollo-8/5198544


Many scientists weren’t above seeing Apollo’s significance beyond science, as seen in some of the videos above. In the special report, they included more interviews with Bernard Lovell, Harold Urey, and Eugene Shoemaker:

https://www.c-span.org/clip/reel-america/user-clip-scientific-perspectives-on-apollo-8/5198546

Spectacle on Other Worlds

On By invertingvisionIn History, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Lunar Robotics, Planetary Science, Robotics, Space ExplorationLeave a comment

The first spacecraft from Earth to touch another world carried no people, but it did carry a unique sort of flag. Early on the morning of September 14, 1959, the Soviet space probe Luna 2 impacted the surface of the Moon. Engineers had placed stainless steel spheres aboard the spacecraft, designed to send tiny pentagonal banners across the lunar landscape. The little flags were emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, and Russian script reading: “CCCP, September, 1959.”1

A replica of the Luna 2 pennant on display in the Kansas Cosmosphere. Source: Patrick Pelletier via Wikimedia.

The spheres were made at OKB-1, the Experimental Design Bureau where engineers worked under the leadership of Sergei Korolev to create some of the first space rockets. 2 They were commonly referred to as pennants,3 and you can find more pictures of these pennants on Don P. Mitchell’s excellent website.4 Mitchell speculates that the Luna 2 pennants probably vaporized on impact. On the other hand, the New York Times reported at the time that “[the Soviet Government] said steps had been taken to prevent the destruction of the pennants by the impact.” Regardless of their survival, the pennants accomplished an important objective.

“The day after the historic impact,” historian Asif Siddiqi writes, “[Nikita] Khrushchev triumphantly gave a replica of the ball of pendants to Eisenhower. It was a potent display of the power of politics in the emerging Soviet space programme.”5 This was the point: a spectacle designed to send a message to the United States about the Soviet lead in missile development. There was some (faint) hope on the Soviet side that this spectacle would actually end the Cold War altogether.6

Luna 2’s pennants were just one in a series of such spectacles that constituted the Space Race. From Sputnik to Apollo, visible demonstrations of power replaced nuclear war. In the competition for geopolitical influence that was the Cold War, these projects signaled the strength of competing economic ideologies to worldwide spectators.7 In the 1950s and 1960s, this political impetus for spectacle led humans to explore the solar system up close for the first time. We sent robots to other worlds, and people to the Moon, because of a geopolitical competition. But is that the only reason we went?

I have been fascinated by the reasons people participated in the Space Race–especially the engineers and scientists who worked directly on missions to other celestial bodies. Certainly many of them were Cold Warriors, eager and willing to be recruited to a geopolitical signalling war. But not all of them were, and even those who happily went to nationalistic battle often had priorities that ranked higher in their own minds. In fact, these other motivations may have played a strong role in making the Space Race happen in the first place.

Luna 2 itself may be an example. Siddiqi explains that “contrary to conventional wisdom, it was not the Soviet Party leadership which advocated or called for Soviet pre-eminence in space at this early stage, but Korolev himself who was actualising his intense thirst to claim ‘firsts’ in the new arena of space exploration.” He goes on to say that Korolev was in partly motivated by competition with Wernher von Braun. “One wonders if there would indeed have been a programme at the time if it had not been for Korolev,” Siddiqi writes. The engineers had to convince the Cold Warriors that lunar flights were worth doing.8

Engineering ambitions and personal rivalry were not the only motivations for early space explorers. One of the most interesting examples I have seen comes from Oran Nicks, who was NASA’s director of Lunar and Planetary Programs in the early 1960s. Nicks was an engineer in a department of scientists, and that put him in a unique position. He was also not a Cold Warrior, at least not to the extent of many of his colleagues.

This isn’t to say the political pressures of the Space Race weren’t on his mind. In the early 60s, Nicks was working on the Ranger impact probes to the Moon, which were plagued by a series of early failures. In his book Far Travelers, Nicks recalls that Luna’s successes had made these failures particularly difficult. “Khrushchev had chided us publicly,” Nicks writes, “by quipping that their pennant had gotten lonesome waiting for an American companion.”

But when it came to making an overtly nationalistic response, Nicks took a different attitude. He recounts a disagreement that came up during work on a Mariner probe to Mars. Mariner project manager Jack James had suggested that the spacecraft should have the seal of the United States embossed on a panel, and went to the trouble of mocking it up.9 Nicks was vehemently opposed. Here’s what he wrote (emphasis mine):

His view was understandable; we were competing with the Russians in the race to the planets, and Americans could be proud that our “trademark” would be exhibited for current and future generations to see. My concern was that we might be accused of exhibitionism, something distasteful to me, for I was deadly serious about doing the mission for other reasons. The Russians had bragged about landing a pendant on the Moon, and I wanted no part in that disgusting game.

Oran Nicks, Far Travelers, p 37

Nicks and James compromised, and the seal made it onto the spacecraft. Nicks explains that he “insisted on a low-profile, no-publicity approach,” and was happy that “even after the successful flight there was very little publicity about the seal, and none at all negative.”10

Nicks doesn’t specify which Mariner, but it was likely Mariner IV (1964), shown here. Images comes from Wikimedia, but the original source link is broken. A black-and-white version of this image can be found in NASA Technical Report 32-957 on the temperature control subsystem.

So what were the “other reasons” that Nicks was deadly serious about? To Nicks, the American space program was a project of exploration, pure and simple. He had an expansive definition of the word “explorer” that was rooted in his view of history:

Exploration seems to be in our genes. As they developed the means to do it, men explored the perimeter of the Mediterranean, past the pillars of Hercules, to the sentinel islands off the continent…We tend now to think of exploration in a restricted sense-as a scientific, often geographic, expedition, an athletic activity pursued by specialists dressed in fur parkas like Shackleton’s or in solar topees like Livingston’s. The connotations are overly restrictive if they fail to allow for great tidal movements like the waves of people from Asia that periodically flowed west and south, or for the Scandanavians who crossed the Atlantic in numbers centuries before Columbus. These waves of venturesome people were of a higher order than the random movement of nomads seeking fresh forage…We must conclude that for some of the species, long and perilous passages were no real deterrent to the exploring imperative.

Oran Nicks, Far Travelers, pp 6-7

Nicks is conflating a series of explorations that all occurred for different reasons ranging from survival, to geopolitics, to science. To him, they are part of an innate impulse that all humans have in common. He is situating himself, the United States, and the Soviet Union in a grand tradition that encompasses all of human history.

He was not the only person to do this sort of thing. The space explorers of the 1960s often invoked historical analogy–in the US, this was often the narrative of the American frontier. But these analogies were often related to more specific impulses: colonization, adventure, competition, scientific investigation. Nicks’ framing of exploration as an “instinct” is somewhat distinct. He believes that exploration is something done for its own sake, out of sheer curiosity. The scientific investigations on the missions he managed were an expression of this curiosity, rather than a means to some other end.11

Chertok, in his reflections on the Soviet space program, also remembers people thinking beyond the geopolitics:

Cosmonautics did not arise simply from militarization, and its aims were more than purely propagandistic. During the first post-Sputnik year, the foundations were laid for truly scientific research in space, serving the interests of all humankind…I am not writing about this out of nostalgia for the ‘good old days,’ but because I remember well how people from the most diverse social strata felt about our space successes.

Chertok, Rockets and People, Volume II, pp 435-436

The space programs in both nations were collaborations between people with widely varying motivations. They convinced their governments that pursuing certain objectives in space also served the ends of the state. They competed with each other for funding and for influence over the long-term direction of their programs. In this context, geopolitical competition seems like less of a direct motivation for space exploration, and more of an enabling factor that unlocked resources for would-be explorers.

  1. Siddiqi, Asif A. “First to the Moon,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol 51, pp 231-238, 1998, PDF: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ef8124031cfcf448b11db32/t/5f1c476085d7250b810190c1/1595688803275/Siddiqi+First+to+the+Moon+1998.pdf ↩︎
  2. Chertok, Boris, ed. Asif Siddiqi, Rockets and People, Volume II: Creating a Rocket Industry, NASA, 2006, pp 446-448 PDF: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/635963main_rocketspeoplevolume2-ebook.pdf?emrc=5bed7c ↩︎
  3. Are they called “pennants” or “pendants”? Contemporary newspapers, Mitchell and most other sources say pennants. Siddiqi and Chertok say pendant. Seems to come from a comparison made to ship’s pennant displays (Chertok, in unsourced quote from 447). Wikipedia says pendant is an obsolete spelling of pennant, citing the Dictionary of Vexillology. ↩︎
  4. I’m probably going to link to Mitchell and Sven Grahn a lot on this blog. They have both done amazing work on early Soviet robotics, among other topics, and their work has led me to important sources. You should check out their websites and their books. ↩︎
  5. Siddiqi, p 235-236 The image at the top of this post shows an additional replica, now sitting in the Kansas Cosmosphere. The original replica is held by the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. ↩︎
  6. Chertok, p 447 Certainly it seems like Chertok may have believed this, or believed that Soviet leaders held that hope. “Alas,” he writes, “this did not happen. It was not in our power.” ↩︎
  7. See MacDonald, Alexander, The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War, 2017, Yale University Press. Especially Chapter 4. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1n2tvkx.8 ↩︎
  8. Siddiqi, pp 231-232 ↩︎
  9. Nicks, Oran, Far Travelers: The Exploring Machines, NASA, 1985, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19850024813 ↩︎
  10. Nicks, p 37 ↩︎
  11. Werner Von Braun, for example, was certainly motivated by colonization and also religious notions. Historian Catherine Newell writes about religious aspects of the American space program in her book Destined for the Stars. Historian Michael Robinson has talked about “true believers” among other types of space explorers. Russian cosmism was a big influence on early Soviet engineers. I plan to do a taxonomy of space explorers at some point, going through various motivations and the historical analogies used to justify and explain them. I see Nicks’ expansive definition of exploration as human instinct most reflected in Carl Sagan’s writings. ↩︎

The First Time NASA Photographed a Lunar Lander

On By invertingvisionIn History, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Lunar Robotics, Photography, Planetary Science, Robotics, Space ExplorationLeave a comment

The Odysseus lunar lander built by Intuitive Machines (IM) recently became the first U.S. robot on the Moon’s surface since the Surveyor landers in the 1960s. Earlier this week, IM worked with NASA to get pictures of the lander from orbit. The resulting image is impressive, showing the lander as a tiny speck in the vast grey landscape near the Moon’s south pole. The image is also an echo of the first time NASA managed this feat, 57 years ago. In 1967, NASA’s third Lunar Orbiter spacecraft snagged a photograph of Surveyor I. The story of how engineers acquired that photograph (and it is a literal analog photograph) is fascinating, and the image itself played an important role in getting Apollo astronauts to the Moon. First, here’s the image of Odysseus along with the historic photograph of Surveyor:

Odysseus in the South Polar region of the Moon. Taken with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University
Surveyor I in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon. Taken with Lunar Orbiter III in 1967. Credit: NASA

It’s a bit easier to see Odysseus in the new image than it is to see Surveyor in the Lunar Orbiter (LO) photograph. But both of them are pretty difficult to spot, beyond the telltale shadow. And making out any detail is impossible. So what’s the point? For NASA in the 1960s, it was all about safety.

At the time, the push toward the Apollo landings was quickly accelerating. One of the top priorities was to find suitable landing sites. Telescopic imagery of the Moon was fairly comprehensive, but had some serious limitations, so NASA initiated the Lunar Orbiter program. Engineers put robots into orbit around the Moon, equipped with Kodak cameras and film, and took high-resolution images of potential Apollo landing sites.1 Meanwhile, they Surveyor robots soft-landed on the surface, took pictures, and used scoops to dig into the soil. Knowledge about the nature of the lunar surface grew rapidly. It began to quell doubts that some scientists held about the potential of landing people on the Moon.2 The imaging of Surveyor landing sites was an important part of this process.

For scientists in the 1960s, seeing the lander wasn’t as important as seeing the area around the it. Images from the ground could help scientists understand what they were seeing from above. At the time, orbital imagery was pretty difficult to interpret. Shadows were used to figure out the height or depth of some features, but other patterns in the orbital imagery were harder to make sense of. Scientists used aerial imagery of Earth to get started, since you could easily compare pictures of mountains and canyons taken from airplanes to the real thing.3 But the forces that shaped features on Earth weren’t necessarily the same as those that shaped features on the Moon, so the Earth-analog method was not always a reliable guide. What they really wanted were images from the lunar surface. That’s what Surveyor landers were able to provide.

If scientists could compare orbital images with ground-based images of the real lunar surface, they could be more confident in their interpretations. This could make it easier to select Apollo landing sites with confidence. And that’s exactly what they did using a combination Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter imaging. The story of Surveyor III gives us a great example of this.

Surveyor III. Credit: NASA/Lunar and Planetary Institute

In the same mission that took the photograph of Surveyor I, engineers also took photos of the planned landing area for Surveyor III (which launched while LOIII was still in orbit around the Moon). They hoped that a successful Surveyor III mission would then provide images from the ground that scientists could compare to orbital imagery. The plan was a complete success. Using pictures from Surveyor III, they were able to isolate the exact position of Surveyor III in the orbital imagery.4

An image from Boeing’s contractor report on Lunar Orbiter III photography. The final Surveyor landing site is shown, along with features that later seen in Surveyor pictures, included below. Credit: NASA/Boeing
A mosaic of images taken by Surveyor III, with features labeled A, B, C, D, which correspond to labels on orbital images.
Mosaic images of the area to the north of Surveyor III, including one with labels that correlate to those on the Lunar Orbiter photograph above. Credit: NASA/LPI
An image taken by the Surveyor lunar lander, showing two boulders that were labeled "C" on orbital images.
A close-up of boulders, labeled “C” on the orbital image above. Taken by Surveyor III in April 1967. Credit: NASA/LPI

Scientists got a lot of great data from the robots. Apollo planners analyzed the images and data, and used the information to plan Apollo landing sites. They were able to find places that were both safe for landing, and scientifically interesting. For scientists, that generally meant trying to land Apollo astronauts in places that were geologically distinct.

This wasn’t really something that many of the astronauts were particularly interested in, at least at first. They were something of soldiers in the Cold War, and neither they nor the government officials directing the program thought that science was the main priority. The priority was getting a man to the Moon before the Soviet Union.5 The selection of later Apollo sites based on scientific interest was, at least in part, a concession to the scientists who were integral to the safety and success of the mission’s primary objective. But this isn’t to say that these groups saw no use for science within Apollo. Science itself could also serve Cold War goals, as it became a source of prestige–a pattern in scientific exploration going back centuries.

With Apollo 12, the story of Surveyor III came full circle and we got one of the coolest pictures ever taken from the lunar surface. Out of scientific and engineering interest, Apollo 12 landed in the same site as Surveyor III. Al Bean and Pete Conrad got to see the robot up close, which is how we have the image from earlier showing Surveyor sitting on the Moon. They took pictures, and even grabbed pieces of the robot to bring back home for analysis. Right now, the TV camera of Surveyor III sit in the Smithsonian, where you can visit and see actual hardware returned from the Moon. The Apollo astronauts also took what I think are some of the most incredible photographs from the history of exploration–human space explorers interacting directly with their robot counterparts.

Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad “jiggles” the spacecraft to see how firmly it’s rooted to the ground. Credit: NASA

CORRECTION 11/21/2024: The original version of this post identified the astronaut in the last picture as Alan Bean. It’s actually Pete Conrad, and Alan Bean is the one taking the photograph.

Footnotes:

  1. If you want to know more about this, Lunar Orbiter photography was the topic of my master’s thesis, which can be found in the about section. ↩︎
  2. There’s a famous story of how scientists feared the landing vehicle would sink into the soil, an idea that did come from a fairly well-known scientist. But many geologists at the time were pretty dismissive of his claims. There were other potential issues though, including ignorance of the electrostatic properties of the lunar material, which could have led to severe dust build-up on equipment. Bottom line: not a lot was known for sure about the nature of the surface. This was an issue if you wanted to land there. ↩︎
  3. For a description of lunar mapping efforts around this time, see Kopal and Carder, Mapping of the Moon. The difficulty of interpreting the photographs can be seen in a variety of scientific papers from the time. Examples can be found in Interpretation of Lunar Probe Data, ed. Jack Green, 1966. ↩︎
  4. Boeing was the primary contractor on Lunar Orbiter. Images and methods can be found in their contractor reports for NASA. ↩︎
  5. Detailed comments the relative priority of science on the Apollo Mission can be seen in A Review of Space Research, the document that came out of the 1962 Iowa Summer Study. ↩︎