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Old 08-20-2018, 12:48 AM
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bernomatic bernomatic is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by blackshire
I know--that famous night shot of Pioneer 1 on the pad shortly before launch is iconic. Pioneer 0 was launched during the day, and Pioneer 2 also went at night (see: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F...I_Pioneer_2.png ). After it "fizzled," the U.S. Army and NASA got two additional tries, using Juno II rockets and the much smaller, conical JPL lunar flyby Pioneer spacecraft, on December 6, 1958 and March 3, 1959 (see: http://www.google.com/search?q=Pion...iw=1440&bih=794 ), and:

They had originally been intended to make figure-8 loops behind the Moon to photograph the far side, radioing back the pictures when near the Earth again. A film camera/developer/"flying spot of light" picture scanner was developed for these Pioneers, but when Pioneer 1's radiation data showed that radiation shielding for the film would be too heavy (the tiny ~13 pound probes were all the Juno II could boost to the Moon!), JPL started developing a spin-scan TV camera, but it wasn't ready in time. (The deployable "wizard's cap" conical low-gain antennas on the Ranger 3, 4, and 5 probes [the Block II series that carried the hard-landing seismometer capsules] were re-purposed Pioneer 3/4 rod-and-cone, off-center-fed dipole antennas.) As well:

Pioneer 3 suffered a fate similar to Pioneer 1, rising about 63,000 miles before falling back to Earth after the stretched Jupiter first stage cut off slightly early, returning more radiation data. Pioneer 4 achieved escape velocity, returning radiation data out to 407,000 miles after passing about 37,000 miles from the Moon. Between the Pioneer 3 and 4 launches, the Soviet Union's Luna 1--an intended lunar impact probe--had been launched on January 2, 1959, and had missed the Moon by 3,725 miles (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_1 ) before entering solar orbit, making Pioneer 4 an "also ran."


It's amazing to think of the things they did with the technology they had in the fifties. There is so much the younger generations take for granted today that engineers of that time would have given, well would have given all they had to get it. Can you imagine what they would have done with a Go-Pro and the digital visualizing of it's images?
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