Drama from the Moon

The script called for a spaceman's view of a crash landing on the moon. For background music there would be the high whine of telemetry signals literally coming from out of this world. With the aid of some of the nation's greatest scientists and engineers, that unprobable show was precisely what the TV networks offered their audience last week. Live from the spacecraft Ranger IX came man's closest and sharpest look at his lunar neighbor.

The series of pictures that Ranger sent home from its final dive began with a view of the Crater Alphonsus and its neighbors, a picture that just about matched the best that have been taken by the biggest telescopes on earth. Then, as the spacecraft plunged toward its impact point, the lunar landscape expanded. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the field of view narrowed (see cuts), and details emerged that had never before been glimpsed by human eyes.

The great ring of Alphonsus, 75 miles in diameter, grew immensely. A new picture appeared every five seconds; the famous rills (cracks visible to astronomers on earth) stood out more plainly than ever. New rills appeared, some of them with little craters strung along them like beads. Between them, the floor of Alphonsus, which looks smooth from the distant earth, turned out to be spotted with craters, some single, others in lines, a few showing dark halos.

Faster and faster fell Ranger IX, tugged by the moon's gravitation until it reached the speed of nearly 6,000 m.p.h. Its cameras never faltered. They sent their pictures to the end, giving countless millions of televiewers a look at the crater floor as it might be seen from the cockpit of a spacecraft about to land. The last pictures were transmitted just .45 seconds before impact from three-quarters of a mile above the lunar surface. They showed objects as small as ten inches.

Delicate Perfection. From start to crash, the flight of Ranger IX was a model of perfection, a triumph of tight coordination between computer-armed men on earth and an incredibly delicate spacecraft, outbound at the end of a far-ranging radio beam. The takeoff from Cape Kennedy developed no trouble at all; the original aim was so good that Ranger IX would have hit the moon without course correction. But the scientists at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are well practiced by now; they intended to do much better than that. When the spacecraft was 175,000 miles from the earth, they sent it radioed orders to fire a small rocket in a specified direction for 31 seconds. Soon their computers had calculated Ranger's new course and predicted that impact would be within a few miles of the desired point.

When Ranger was 1,300 miles from the moon, other orders climbed the radio beam from California and told the spacecraft to turn on its six TV cameras. Without further fuss the incredible moon photos began to come down in a steady stream. In 1.3 seconds they made the long journey from the moon to J.P.L.'s control station in the Mojave Desert. They jumped by microwave to Pasadena, appeared in crisp detail on fine-grained, 1,152-line picture tubes and were transformed into the standard 500-line pictures of U.S. commercial television. Never had so many people had so intimate a look at the full glory of high technical achievement.

Treacherous Floor. Two earlier Rangers sent back excellent pictures of the moon's surface, but they did not appear live on TV, and they showed the vast, pock-marked monotony of the moon's level plains. Last week the cameras focused on far stranger scenery. But this was no sightseeing expedition. Alphonsus was picked as the impact point because its floor is level and it seemed a possible landing point for lunar explorers.

Analysis of these latest views will go on for years, but the far-out television of Ranger IX has already bolstered the theory that the moon has traces of recent volcanism. The black-haloed craters, in particular, hint that some material was spewed out of the interior. Besides swarms of small craters made by meteor impacts, the floor of Alphonsus has "dimples" where loose material apparently has drained into underground cavities. Some of these are in lines which suggest that under the surface may run treacherous cracks like the hidden crevasses in a snow-covered glacier. It is topography that may fascinate astronomers, but as a possible landing place for astronauts, it looks even worse than the pitted plains.

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