Surveyor 1

Sixty years ago today, NASA was making its first attempt to land on the Moon. Surveyor 1 had been launched three days earlier. The robotic lander touched down in a crater in the Ocean of Storms – a giant volcanic plain. It was a precursor to the Apollo missions, which would land astronauts on the Moon. Surveyor wasn’t the first probe to land on the Moon – a Soviet mission beat it by a few months. But Surveyor was more sophisticated. It carried a television camera to beam back images of its surroundings. Surveyor transmitted its first pictures just minutes after landing. And during its first lunar “day” – almost 14 Earth days – it snapped more than 10 thousand images. They showed a surface coated with small rocks, and pockmarked by small craters. The rim of the crater Surveyor landed in was visible in the distance. Pictures of its landing pads revealed important details about the texture of the lunar surface, as this NASA documentary pointed out: ANNOUNCER: The lunar surface texture not thick layers of loose dust into which spacecraft or men could sink. In the area of the Ocean of Storms, man can land and walk on the lunar surface. Surveyor 1 survived the frigid lunar night, taking hundreds more pictures the next day. Scientists even raised it the following January – seven months after its historic landing on the Moon. Script by Damond Benningfield