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Aviation History
1968
1968 - 0098.PDF
100 FLIGHT International, 18 January to Surveyor 7 Moon pictures (see "u Surveyor's Success," this page): at u wide-ang/e view of a duster of rocks n« the landing site; below, self-portrait of 4 spacecraft's omni-directional antenna b® and photometric chart mounted at the of /t. A Surveyor 7 test model was h trated in "Flight" for January 4 and pages 35 and 66 respectively 91 Spaceflighl 1967 SPACE "SCORiS" Details of publicised space shots during the second half of 1967 are given in the Spacecraft Scoreboard published in this issue pages 103-5). Taken together with the Scoreboard for the first half of the year (Flight, July 27, 1967, pages 148-150) it shows that, out of a total of 154 launches noted for 1967, the Americans (or US vehicles) put up 83 and the Russians 69. Norad (North American Air Defence Command, Colorado Springs, Col), said on January 5 that more than 400 pieces of man-made equipment had been put into space during 1967, most Qf it "junk" like burned-out rockets. The United States had launched 88 payloads into space and the USSR 72. France had put up two and Australia and Italy one each. The Soviet Union had, however, put 156 "junk" items into space compared with the USA's 117. Since the USSR first launched Sputnik 1 ten years ago, Norad said, 3,088 objects had been lofted into space-bi only 1,291 of them were still there. Still in space during 1967, the Command added, were 2) American satellites and 14 deep space probes, 54 Russia satellites and 12 deep space probes, five French satellites, ti British and two Canadian satellites, and one Australia satellite. LAST SURVEYOR'S SUCCESS At 2305 GMT last Tuesday, January 9, the last of the Survey! series of lunar exploration space vehicles, Surveyor 7, madej soft landing in its destined arrival area, the highlands aroutj the Crater Tycho (Flight, January 4, page 35), and shortl afterwards radioed that all was well. Initial trajectory of the H-ton spacecraft, carrying camera, digger and soil analyser, after launch from Kenn Space Centre on Sunday, January 7, on its 65hr, 244,000-mJ voyage to the Moon, would have placed Surveyor 7 at 800 miles north of its intended landing site. A first in-fl correction, radioed during the afternoon of January 7, bent i flight path: a Jet Propulsion laboratory spokesman said ft the Surveyor "responded nicely," repositioning itself in spai and firing a retro rocket for 11.3sec. On Monday evening i last week, January 8, a second manoeuvre refined the spacecraft trajectory towards a landing target circle only \2\ miles w just north of the crater Tycho. Project officials had given Surveyor 7 only two chances < of five of landing safely on the Moon, because the target * so small and the terrain so rugged; but they considered that ti potential scientific gains outweighed the risks. At a pre-lai" briefing the programme director, Mr Benjamin Milwitzky, that if scientists could determine its chemical composition aj physical properties from material excavated from below » lunar crust "I think it may put us very far ahead in the un* standing of the processes by which the Moon was formed." By Wednesday of last week, January 10, Surveyor 7 j11 transmitted 1,225 television pictures of the lunar surface r Earth seen from the Moon.
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