60 a
These rare contact sheets (used at NASA headquarters in Washington in 1968 to consult available photographs of the mission) depict different aspects of the Ranger missions including views of the spacecrafts with equipments, technicians, launch facilities; and views of the Atlas-Centaur rockets on pad and lifting off, from Ranger I in 1961 to Ranger IX in 1965.

60 b
“Technician at the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory monitors test of Ranger III’s solar panels” (NASA caption).

Block I versions of the Ranger spacecraft, consisting of two spacecraft launched into Earth orbit in 1961, were intended to test the Atlas-Agena launch vehicle and spacecraft equipment without attempting to reach the Moon.

Ranger III, launched 26 January 1962, America’s first lunar probe, was the first of the Block II versions of the Ranger project but the spacecraft failed and missed the Moon by about 36,800 km, and has orbited the Sun ever since.

Ranger’s Block III embodied four launches in 1964-65. Ranger VI, had a flawless flight, except that the television system was disabled by an in-flight accident and could take no pictures.
The next three Rangers, with a redesigned television, were completely successful.

60 c
NASA’s lunar assault began with a spectacular breakthrough: the “crashlander” Ranger VII was the first space probe to send close-up pictures of the Moon before it impacted on the lunar surface.

This photograph was taken by the F-B camera and its 76mm, f/2 lens; north is at the top.

[NASA caption] Picture 0030
This is one of the early television pictures taken by Ranger VII. It was shot at impact minus 15 minutes and 6 seconds at an altitude of 1,163 miles. The picture shows an area 260 miles wide. Visible are craters Arzachel, bottom right, Alphonsus, center right, and Guericke, upper left. A small portion of the huge Crater Ptolemaus is seen at upper right. This picture is unusual because Earth-based telescopes cannot see into the craters at the right of picture at as low an angle as they were photographed by Ranger VII. The craters at the right are actually rounder than shown but are distorted because of the extreme angle and the curvature of the Moon.

60 d
This picture was taken by the F-A camera with its wide-angle 25mm, f/1 lens. Viewed with the three large shallow craters in the upper right hand corner, north is at the bottom. It closely duplicates resolution obtained in Earth based photography. The large 44-km open dark crater in upper margin is Lubiniezky (17.8°S, 23.8°W).

“Ranger VII was designed to achieve a lunar impact trajectory and to transmit high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface during the final minutes of flight up to impact. The spacecraft carried six television vidicon cameras, 2 Full-scan cameras (channel F, one wide-angle A, one narrow-angle B) and 4 Partial-scan cameras (channel P, two wide-angle P1 and P2, two narrow-angle P3 and P4) to accomplish these objectives. The cameras were arranged in two separate chains, or channels, each self contained with separate power supplies, timers, and transmitters so as to afford the greatest reliability and probability of obtaining high-quality video pictures” (https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=1964-041A).

60 e
These are four lunar photographs taken by the four partial scan P cameras of NASA’s Ranger VII between 2.3 and 2.9 seconds from impact on the lunar surface from an altitude between 3.73 miles and 4.71 miles above the surface, with a picture width between 790 and 2550 feet.

“The final F-channel image was taken between 2.5 and 5 sec before impact (altitude about 5 km) and the last P channel image 0.2 to 0.4 sec before impact (altitude about 600 m). The images provided better resolution than was available from Earth based views by a factor of 1000. These highly detailed images showed Apollo planners that finding a smooth landing site was not going to be easy” (https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/ranger.html).