Shortly after its inception in 1958, NASA inherited a strange legacy of lunar missions from the Department of Defense's Pioneer program and for over a decade they would struggle to perfect lunar exploration with the Pioneer and Ranger programs. In 1964, Ranger 7 reached the moon and took over 4000 photographs and beamed them back to earth before crash landing into the moon's surface.
Ranger 7 was an unmanned U.S. lunar probe, and on this day in 1964 it took the first close-up images of the moon — 4,308 in total — before it ended it's mission by impacting with the lunar surface northwest of the Sea of the Clouds. The images Ranger 7 took were 1,000 times as clear as anything ever seen through earth-bound telescopes.
Ranger 7 launched from Earth on July 28 and successfully activated its cameras 17 minutes, or 1,300 miles, before impact and began beaming the images back to NASA’s receiving station in California. The pictures showed that the lunar surface was not excessively dusty or otherwise treacherous to a potential spacecraft landing, thus lending encouragement to the NASA plan to send astronauts to the moon. In July 1969, two Americans walked on the moon in the first Apollo Program lunar landing mission.
You can watch the original video of the mission here:
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