63a
The photograph shows the 30-km sister craters Ritter and Sabine, on the edge of the southwestern Sea of Tranquillity (north to the right) seen by the crashlander 2 minutes and 15 seconds before impact . The future Apollo 11 landing site is just out of shot at the bottom; the small 3-km crater visible at the bottom center was later named Crater Aldrin. The Hypathia rilles parallel to the left shoreline run for a length of about 180 km across the Sea of Tranquillity.
“It was one of 7137 photographs that Ranger VIII returned before impacting within 30 kilometers of its target in Mare Tranquillitatis, on February 20, 1965.
Taken from an altitude of 243.4 kilometers, it covers approximately 25 square kilometers. The resolution is about 10 times the best Earth-based resolution, thus revealing considerably greater detail than ever before about the structure of the Hypatia Rilles and the flat-bottomed craters Ritter and Sabine. While the rilles appear to be similar to the graben found on Earth, the cause of the faulting is not revealed. Several northnorthwest gouge features are the result of secondary impacts of ejecta derived from the crater Theophilus. Ranger Vlll impacted within the Apollo landing zone and achieved a terminal resolution of approximately 1.5 meters,” said Raymond Heacock, Chief, Lunar and Planetary instruments Section, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Cortright, p. 47).
63 b
The Ranger VIII spacecraft was deliberately crashed into the Sea of Tranquillity (2.67°N 24.65°E ) at 1:57:36 a.m. EST (about 70 km distant from where Apollo 11 would land 4 years later) after successfully transmitting close-range photographs of the surface in the final 23 minutes of its mission.
This is the last photograph transmitted by the crashlander’s camera F-A 2,09 seconds before impact on the lunar surface from an altitude of 12,000 feet above the Moon. The area shown is 5000 feet in diameter with north to the right.
The spacecraft was destroyed while transmitting, resulting in the receiver noise pattern.
63 c
The robotic spacecraft sent the photograph 9 minutes and 18 seconds before impact from an altitude of 775 miles. The area shown is 147 miles per 123 miles. The image shows more than half of the three major craters Ptolemaus (at the top without central peak), Alphonsus (on the left with rille system and a central peak rising 3,300 feet above floor) and Albategnius (on the right with 4,500 feet central peak).
“NASA’s Ranger IX was the final Ranger mission of the Block III series and closed out the program as a whole. Since both Ranger VII and Ranger VIII had provided sufficient photographs of the mare regions (potential landing sites for the early Apollo missions), Ranger IX was targeted to the more geologically interesting Alphonsus crater in the lunar highlands, a possible site for recent volcanic activity. Only 20 minutes prior to impact, Ranger IX began taking the first of 5,814 pictures from an altitude of 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers). Unlike its predecessors, the cameras this time were aimed in the direction of travel and provided some spectacular shots as the spacecraft approached the lunar surface. These pictures were converted for live viewing on commercial TV” (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/ranger-9/in-depth/).
63 d
This last photograph transmitted by the crashlander’s camera F-A before its impact slightly northeast of the central peak of Alphonsus Crater was taken 2.97 seconds before impact from an altitude of 4.5 miles. Dimensions 2.1 by 2.0 miles.
Craters down to 40 feet in size can be seen.
Ranger IX images provided strong confirmation of the crater-on-crater, gently rolling contours of the lunar surface.
“The spacecraft crashed onto the Moon at 14:08:20 GMT March 24, 1965, at 12.83° S latitude and 357.63° E longitude, about 4 miles (6.5 km) from its scheduled target at a velocity of about 1.7 miles per second (2.67 kilometers per second)” (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/ranger-9/in-depth/).
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