It's been 60 years since a spacecraft took America's first close-up pictures of the lunar surface, just five years before astronauts set foot on the moon. Ranger 7 finally achieved the feat in July 1964.
60 years since the first artificial spacecraft Luna 2 landed on the moon
The Ranger program started in 1960 and was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. The Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 had already taken the first pictures of the far side of the moon in 1959, but the US was trying to show off its technological prowess with something more high-resolution ahead of a landing expected at the end of the decade.
It was a phased program. The first Block I mission would check out the Atlas-Agena rocket by placing the Ranger spacecraft into a highly elliptical Earth orbit to check out the hardware. The second set of missions, Block II, would impact the moon and take pictures and science data on the way down. They also carried a payload intended to survive the landing and operate for 30 days, transmitting seismic data to Earth.
The final Block III phase would have the spacecraft carry a high-definition imaging system consisting of six wide- and narrow-angle television cameras.
