First Soft Step (1966)

foreign these are the San Gabriel mountains which are behind Papua location of Caltech jet propulsion laboratory we're here to report on most complicated space missions ever attacked project surveyor America's attempt to make a soft landing on the moon be sure to watch this exciting program on science reporter oblique airless satellite of the Earth you have to man this nearest of beacons in the Blackness of space always been an object of romance and wonder and now that it lies within his heart he is determined to know it firsthand how a small and awkward looking little spacecraft called surveyor will help him in this month's journey is our story today on science reporter [Music] [Music] foreign Fitch MIT science reporter today we're at the jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena California to report on the vehicle which will make America's first soft landing on the moon JPL which is operated by the California Institute of Technology on behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been helping to write some exciting new chapters in the history of man's knowledge about the moon it wasn't until the 17th century that man got his first good look at the Moon Galileo's telescope and only much later that scientists realized the importance of that cratered surface as a permanent vacuum clad Museum perhaps even a model of our own Barren Planet as it circled the Sun a few billion years ago over the years technological progress has allowed ever closer looks at the lunar surface but the cost of larger instruments and the limitations imposed by the Earth's Own shimmering atmosphere have brought scientists into a region of ever diminishing returns the next important breakthrough fell of necessity to the Space Age a camera carrying probe to the Moon itself in July of 1964 after six failures or partial failures Ranger 7 returned over 4 000 of these high quality photographs before crashing contentedly on the moon these photographs had better than a thousand times the resolution of our telescopes and contributed mightily to man's knowledge about the move but even with the large stores of data we've collected about the moon both from Ranger 7 and from these Ranger 9 pictures there remained many significant question marks is the lunar surface rough or is it smooth is it hard rock or nearly soft powder answers to these questions are imperative before man can be expected to venture upon the scene two spacecraft will be responsible for getting this Vital Information by mid-1966 a lunar orbiter such as this should be circling the moon and returning more exact measurements of our oldest satellite shape mass and gravitational characteristics at about the same time a new page in space history may be in the writing with this unlikely little vehicle this is the surveyor spacecraft and in spite of its seeming vulnerability and awkwardness surveyor is scheduled for one of the most complex space missions yet attempted by man a soft landing on the moon for it's only with a soft Landing for TV cameras and other instruments remain intact the detailed facts about the nature of the lunar surface can be obtained thus Paving the way for the day when man first puts his foot upon the Moon while JPL has Prime responsibility for surveyors development production and flight actual manufacturing goes on at Hughes aircraft company in El Segundo California see one of the spacecraft and learn about its flight plan we talked to Dr Robert Roderick surveyor Project Director at Hughes the surveyor environmental test facility John where we simulate missions to the moon really we have here a real live spacecraft that has just recently completed two such simulated missions to the moon in the thermal vacuum chamber it was a very strange looking object it's not at all the way I would have pictured a spacecraft well as you know uh between here and the moon there are there isn't any atmosphere and because of this we don't need to streamline like you do in modern jets right and without the streamlining requirement we Engineers put the equipment wherever we want to put it what is a what looks like aluminum foil tin foil all over everything well one of the problems that are is important in the design of the severe spacecraft is the control of the heat coming into the spacecraft and the heat leaving it and the reflective surfaces we have here are to reflect the Sun away where we don't want it to get hot and the darker surfaces are to absorb the energy where we want to warm it up would you tell us now how it will work on its way to the moon and when it gets there well the mission starts as you know at uh at Cape Kennedy the launch vehicle is the Atlas Centaur not too long after launch when the atlas 10 fire has gotten out of the atmosphere uh let me show you on the model here how it works uh there's the Shroud over the spacecraft while it's on the Centaur this shroud is opened up after getting out of the atmosphere then the surveyor itself is put into pretty much its Landing configuration the legs are swung out like this as you see in the real live vehicle here and the uh antennas for communication are also swung out then after that is done we inject the Centaur injects the spacecraft on the trajectory to the Moon after the injection the spacecraft separates and is on its own then we have a fairly critical maneuver to make we have to get locked onto the Sun and we have to get locked onto the star canopus we want to lock onto the Sun so that the solar panel which we erect receives the energy from the Sun to power the spacecraft spacecraft here for test purposes has the solar panel removed now how do you get that pointed at the sun then we rotate the vehicle so it's the point at the Sun and then we also rotate the vehicle in asthma so it's the point that the star canopus now how do you how do you know where the sun is and I don't know where this starts and both of those have sensors or both of those operations are controlled by sensors on this flight control sensor group the sun acquisition is a little Sun sensor here which detects the energy of the sun sort of a photocell photocell like the stars are detected through the canopa sensor here which allows us to lock onto the star canopies now how do you turn this thing around while you're looking for what you're trying to find well we're already separated from the Centaur so it can't help us out but what we do is we have some cold gas jets here located on each of the legs one on each of the legs which squirt out high pressure nitrogen in order to rotate the vehicle the source of that nitrogen is a spherical bottle here you can't see it too well which stores the nitrogen under very high pressure now you haven't told me why you need to point it in this you know at the sun well of course the sun to get the power but why what does canopies have to do with it the operations that we perform in mid-course and terminally require us to know the attitude of the vehicle in space we get one reference line from the Sun and the other from the Star canopas right and with this information we can make both the mid-course Maneuvers and the terminal Maneuvers if you want to correct the way you're going you have to know which way you're pointed right now right now in order to get a reference for that that's right when when do you make this mid-course correction well about 15 to 20 hours after launch we make the mid-course correction which we make in order to more accurately impact on the moon the kind of information that we use is obtained from the ground system it tells us how much velocity correction to apply to the vehicle we apply this velocity correction by using some small Vernier engines here that you can see here on the vehicle this is one of them there are two others located symmetrically around the vehicle these little rocket engines these are little rocket engine it has a rocket nozzle here and the burns fuel exits down this Direction you don't use the gas jets for this kind of oh the gas jets are much too small to apply the forces to the vehicle we need for that mid-course correction right now up till here we've been describing a mission that has been in effect run before the ranger mission is very similar to this except we have a special problem the ranger because of its operation was allowed to crash into the moon and we don't want to do that we want to land Softly on them right slow down somehow and so we have to have a means of of slowing down in a very careful and controlled way as we approach the moon we fall into it and the velocities that we achieve are of the order of six thousand feet per second to six thousand miles per hour and in order to slow down the first major increment we have a large solid propellant spherical rocket motor which is still hard to see but essentially occupies the center of this vehicle most of the room it's nozzle you can see down here pretty well and and we first at about a thousand miles out in order to use this engine rotate the vehicle to look roughly at the moon so now it's pointing now the moon's pointing down here and we've got the rocket nozzle pointing at the moon when we get to within about 60 miles of the lunar surface a radar which is located in the rocket nozzle itself you can kind of see the shiny edge of it sticking out there that's a sort of a dish antenna it's a dish antenna and that radar detects the distance from the spacecraft to the lunar surface or its altitude and when it gets to be about 60 miles the radar tells the main retro engine to fire that fires and reduces our velocity in a fairly short length of time to about 350 miles an hour what happened to the radar it's right there in the nozzle that's a that's a cute trick we let's let the uh the engine itself throw the radar out in order to save a little weight it's Expendable now when the engine has burned out and we've slowed down to this 350 miles an hour we're about eight to ten miles above the lunar surface at that time we have these small engines again the ones that were used in mid-course running and so when the main engine burns out it just falls out of the vehicle because we're forcing it up here you see then you mean you're supporting the vehicle on these three little Rockets yes we carry the full weight of the vehicle on those Rockets the the trick is that uh while the vehicle weighs 700 pounds and the rockets can only apply a Thrust of maybe 300 pounds to it the weight of the vehicle on the moon is 1 6 the weight of the vehicle too yes they can actually carry the vehicle or hold it up right now these engines are further slowing it down in a Vernier sort of a way but they need to have information about the distance and velocity of the vehicle from the lunar surface in order to obtain this information we have a special Doppler radar system that's used for this purpose uh by the way John this particular radar is essentially the same as will be used by the astronauts and landing on the moon and hence it's particularly important to demonstrate the ability to do it with this type of radar the radar is shown here this is primarily the one of the antennas of the radar you can see the feed system under here which measures the velocity and distance from the spacecraft to the Moon that information is then put in the flight control sensor and is used by these engines and controlling the vehicle and bringing it essentially to a full stop at the lunar surface properly oriented right now that isn't exactly what we do what we actually do is about 13 feet above the lunar surface we cut off these engines and let the vehicle drop to the lunar surface why do you do that well if we were to leave the engines on we're afraid there may be enough dust on the surface we don't know for sure that when they came down near the surface that dust would be thrown up all over the vehicle and would degrade the operation of the thermal surfaces and perhaps the television camera so you actually Let It Drop the last third so we actually Let It Drop the last 13 feet now that sounds like a long way to drop but because of this ratio of lunar gravity to Earth gravity it's only really equivalent to a few feet of drop about the velocity that a parachutist might land on Earth still I would think you might damage the spacecraft well we've made Provisions for that through the use of a landing gear that's not too dissimilar with with what is used on an aircraft it consists of a leg out here with a shock absorber right along here and then on the end of the leg it isn't on this because of test purposes we put a crushable structure that attaches on here and absorbs part of the energy of the impact this crushes as well over here we have a foot pad that has been actually used in a simulated lunar drop and you can see how the structure has been crushed here and how it absorbs the energy of the Fall very interesting well now assuming that you have landed successfully what happens well the first thing we want to do after we land is to take some pictures we have a TV camera that you can see up here this is the mirror it's closed right now but normally it would be open and it can articulate and look all around but the first thing we want to do is to look down at this leg look at this foot pad and see how far it's penetrated into the lunar surface this will be the first clue we'll have as to the character of that lunar surface well thank you very much Dr Roderick the difficulties of perfecting the spacecraft design for a new Mission are always enormous and surveyor is certainly no exception will it survive in outer space the final answer will be known only after the spacecraft makes its actual flight but reasonable predictions of its performance can be made right here on Earth huge simulators such as this one at Hughes aircraft subject surveyor to what Engineers hope are reasonably accurate approximations of space temperatures and vacuum machines specially designed to simulate the vibrations of the launching rocket in The Descent engines Shake engineering models to determine their ability to function under the strain after this test Engineers discovered adjustments in the solar panel mask where necessary the Mast was shortened and stabilized on the basis of data obtained from countless drop tests surveyors legs and feet have been modified until it can settle upright on a large number of rough and sloping surfaces yet until the spacecraft does land successfully and send back pictures no one can be sure that these test platforms are at all like the actual lunar Terrain understandably surveyors closed-loop descent system has posed the greatest development problem of all its radar components retro propulsion unit and three Vernier engines Must ALL operate in precise coordination and free from interference in particular engine vibrations cannot be allowed to confuse the radar sensors as they did in early design stages but even successful test performances can be misleading the spacecraft will be landing on the moon where there's neither air nor wind and where gravity is only one-sixth of that on Earth scaled down models and stabilizing parachutes can help compensate for weight and wind but the only truly reliable test environment for The Descent system is the moon itself design problems for the mission weren't confined to the spacecraft the atlas Centaur launch vehicle designated to boost surveyor into space is a new rocket with some inevitable wrinkles of its own Centaur the new element in the atlas equation was finally declared fully operational in August of 1965. it's a high energy liquid hydrogen second stage rocket a Dynamo capable of putting up to 2500 pounds into deep space once the spacecraft and its launch vehicle have been successfully tested the focus of attention shifts to the goals for which this complex Mission has been planned the prime purpose of surveyor is to make a soft landing on the moon then the collection of information about the lunar surface particularly through the use of television to learn how the TV pictures will be collected and analyzed we talked with Dr Thomas verbalovich of JBL space Sciences division the space science analysis area and this is the area that operates the camera and receives the pictures as they're taken on the Moon by the surveyor spacecraft this console is the space science analysis director's console and next to him sits a an assistant director who is sending the directing the people at Goldstone on what commands to send to the spacecraft to operate the camera when we get to the moon I see the camera doesn't just operate automatically taking pictures no we have two modes of operation we can operate the camera manually by telling the people at Goldstone know what commands to send to the spacecraft where we want the camera to point or we have nearly 500 pre-prepared tapes that have given programs on them and with these pre-prepared tapes we can go through a given set of patterns to get the maximum amount of coverage in the minimum amount of time and get the best possible information that we can get these pre-prepared tapes have information such as iris setting focal lengths Focus settings and even color filters well now can you actually watch the pictures coming back on these monitors here yes we're able to see them on these monitors but it's best to see them over in the engineering console and where we have the information as it's transmitted back scientists sit next to the engineers here but the main information that's coming back comes back on slow scan monitors that uh look very much like this why is it to go across it so slowly this is the information exactly as it's being transmitted back from the from the spacecraft and the information has to be transmitted so slowly because we have so little power available on the moon we just can't send as much information back as rapidly as we would like we take this particular image and photograph it and present it over here on its standard commercial television rates in actual fact we have a monitor upstairs which is called a scan converter that stores this image on it and presents it on this uh at standard commercial television race in fact there are two of these monitors and while the image is being laid down on one of the storage tubes and it's being photographed on the second and they alternate and sending the pictures back because it looks very much like the moon what is it that we're seeing well we have a panorama upstairs this was a scene taken at to out in the desert and we have a camera a television camera just like the one that will be on the severe spacecraft in the middle of this Panorama and we go through training exercises with the camera in the Panorama we're able to send commands to the camera telling it to change the mirror settings change the asthma settings and go through the focus steps and Iris steps that we need to get the proper and best picture how do you record these pictures for posterity oh we record them in much the same way you do it a television Studio we record on Magnetic Tape we also recurved on a 35 millimeter camera here and we record on a 70 millimeter camera upstairs furthermore we have a paper camera in which we get a very quick look at the photographs this camera has as it's a primary medium paper we have a slow scan monitor here the shutter is open the photograph is taken placed on the paper it's processed through here and within 25 seconds of the time that we've taken a picture we have a a photograph we then cut that photograph on this paper cutter which also puts an identification number on the photograph and then after we've prepared the material in this way we give the material to our mosaicer who then places this in relation to all the other photographs that we've previously taken well I see each picture the camera takes is only a very small part of the big picture that's correct this happens to be our telescopic lens and it takes many many photographs as you can see to make up a complete survey we also have a wide angle lens on the camera and we can plot the complete Panorama with many fewer pictures but these are the best resolution photographs now how does he know where to put them they all look like little Blobs of gray to me well on the back of the photograph there is a number and that corresponds to a given Azimuth an elevation that's been recorded on this platen and he just has to fill in by the numbers on this planet because you know where the camera is pointed that's correct well what is this uh sort of a javelin oh this is our low gain antenna and if after we've made the Mosaic we notice that the antenna is not in the photograph it's either fallen off the spacecraft or the camera isn't pointed in the right direction if you've got many of these that are all put together yes I do here's one that uh is completed and it's a whole narrow angle sector made up of nearly 100 pictures we have also a photograph of a mosaic that we made by taking the camera up to the roof of the building and we photographed the building across the street the Telecommunications building you can see the windows in the building automobiles parked on the street in front and you can even see the gravel on the roof of the building that the camera was on it's very kind to tell what do you actually expect to learn from these pictures you take on the moon well by looking at the imprint of the foot of the spacecraft on the moon we hope to get an idea of the strength of the surface and its ability to hold a spacecraft we hope to get an idea of the Topography of the Moon by looking at fine mosaics like this and to look at the fine detail in order to determine the origins and perhaps the structure and the causes of the material that we see on the moon well thank you very much Dr verbalovich the nerve center for all the surveyor flights is the space flight operations facility or sfof to learn more about the project we visited sfof to talk with surveyor project manager for JPL Mr Robert Parks this is the room from which we'll actually control the surveyor spacecraft once it's been launched and on its way to the moon and after it's on the lunar surface we have displays up here which uh give us the characteristics of the spacecraft and the status of all the ground equipment that we use to control the spacecraft how many men does it take to run a place like that well there are several hundred about 200 300 people in here uh very busy during an after actual operation how long does the whole mission take well we get started a few days before launch and then we could be busy in here up to about 14 days that's how long the Sun Shines on the lunar surface well we're The Landing well I haven't thought about that the moon goes around the Earth in 28 days and so half of the time the sun is shining on the on the side that we see that's correct that's a lunar day spacecraft designed to work during the lunar day thank you very much Mr Park June 2nd 1966. dawn of a new lunar day the continuing staccato of surveyors Telemetry indicated that the spacecraft had accomplished its primary Mission a soft lunar Landing had been achieved then from across 250 000 miles of space came the first pictures taken by the spacecraft of the moon's surface initial photos which showed the leg of the spacecraft were wide angle pictures soon scientists at the jet propulsion laboratory commanded a narrow angle telescopic lens into action and photographs of exceptional detail began to arrive on Earth in scanning the area around the surveyor they showed it to be dark relatively smooth and bare encircled by a few Hills and low mountains perhaps the remains of an ancient crater the shadow cast by surveyor itself assured scientists that the spacecraft had indeed landed intact detailed analysis of the Impressions and shadows made by surveyor gave invaluable information about the surface of the moons and is aided in the refinement of techniques or future manned lunar Landings the photos show that the surface is of a soil-like consistency and that's scattered over it is a great variety of rocks and stones of all shapes and sizes some are thought to be the debris thrown out by meteoric impacts other smoother ones are volcanic or molten origin small craters were photographed too some only a few inches in diameter these reveal that the probable depths of the moon's soil is in the vicinity of three or four feet and at the Landing site seems to be a representative sample of the so-called sea areas the changing Shadows resulting from Shots taken at different times during the lunar day helped in calculations of size depth and distance of some of the observable features as these Shadows crept across the surface and the temperatures began to dip scientists at JPL arranged the spacecraft for the long night that it was not expected to survive it not only did live on but it added more photographs during its second day it's still living there a monument to engineering achievement quietly helping to assure the success of Man's first steps on Earth's nearest neighbor back in 1961 our space youth as it were the surveyor program was thought to be a relatively easy one but experiences certainly made us considerably wiser there can be no doubt that project surveyor is one of the most difficult space missions ever attempted it requires all the techniques used in any unmanned space flight plus a most difficult one but soft Landing as this technique is mastered man is very much on his way to the Moon I'm John Fitch MIT science reporter [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign