January 30, 2012 - Lunar Orbiter Liftoff

Published in cooperation with The Planetary Society

Spend the year in space, one week at a time

Recent Weeks

May 14, 2012 - Monkey Nebula

May 7, 2012 - Getting a Grip on INTELSAT

April 30, 2012 - Dust in the Wind

April 23, 2012 - Celebrate Astronomy Day

April 16, 2012 - Rover Rides Again

April 9, 2012 - Mercury’s Marvelous Morphology

April 2, 2012 - A Matter of Truss

March 26, 2012 - Hubble Bubble

March 19, 2012 - Rocket Pioneer Centennial

March 12, 2012 - Southern Lights on Saturn

March 5, 2012 - A New Star in Town

February 27, 2012 - Hubble Upgrade

February 20, 2012 - Sideways Supernova

February 13, 2012 - Auroras Gone Wild

February 6, 2012 - Hubble Telescope Tune-Up

January 30, 2012 - Lunar Orbiter Liftoff

January 23, 2012 - Magellan Turns up the Stereo

January 16, 2012 - Southern Sibling Sees Stars

January 9, 2012 - Hitching a Ride Home

January 2, 2012 - Transforming the Space Frontier

December 26, 2011 - These Laws Can't Be Broken

December 19, 2011 - Long and Winding Road

December 12, 2011 - Blast from the Past

December 5, 2011 - It’s Just Like Folding a Map

November 28, 2011 - A Warmer, Wetter Mars

November 21, 2011 - Spy in the Sky

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The Week in Space

January 30 - February 5, 2012

Lunar Orbiter Liftoff In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five robotic Lunar Orbiter spacecraft to the Moon to create high-resolution photographic maps of the lunar surface to aid in selecting future Apollo landing sites. The images from the Lunar Orbiters arrived at Earth in a unique way: a camera took the photographs, an automatic photo lab on board developed the film using traditional darkroom techniques (modified for the weightlessness of space), and a fax machine scanned the resulting prints and radioed them back to Earth. This created high-resolution strips of images that were then pieced together to form wide-angle mosaics of the Moon, like this oblique view of the fifty-eight-kilometer-wide (thirty-six-mile-wide) Murchison Crater taken by Lunar Orbiter III, launched forty-five years ago this week.

Image credit: NASA