Lunar Landing Places Sought

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31210, 7 November 1966, Page 17

Lunar Landing Places Sought

fN.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) CAPE KENNEDY, Nov. 6. America’s lunar Orbiter II blasts off from Cape Kennedy tonight to seek suitable landing sites on the moon for United States astronauts. An Atlas Agena rocket is to send the 8501 b flying photo laboratory on its 240,000-mile voyage as the United States continues its fast-moving programme to place a man on the moon within the next four years. Space agency officials hope for a repeat performance of the lunar Orbiter I mission last August, which produced the first pictures of the crater-laden terrain returned by a spacecraft circling the moon.

Lunar Orbiter I sent 211 two-picture frames, both wide angle and close-up views, streaming down te earth as the windmill-shaped probe circled the moon in an eliptical path, dipping as close as 25 miles above the surface. Engineers made a minor, but key, change in the lunar Orbiter II camera system to avoid a repetition of the only flaw in lunar Orbiter I’s mission—a slight blurring in the close-up pictures. Lunar Orbiter I had 10 targets along the moon's equatorial region on the side which can be seen from earth, where Apollo astronauts hope to land.

The new probe has 13 different specific targets along this same strip of the moon, including the impact site of the Ranger VIII photographic probe, which returned more than 7000 pictures before it crashed into the surface last year. Lunar Orbiter I kept circling the moon after its mission ended, until a signal from earth last month sent

it crashing into the moon’s surface lest stray signals should interfere with information being sent back by the new probe. America plans to launch a total of five picture-taking lunar Orbiters to supplement surface-level information obtained by the soft-landing Surveyor project.