Slice of History - Fly Me to the Moon

As NASA looks toward returning humans to the moon, we must look back on how we set foot there first. The Surveyor missions were the precursor to humans on the lunar surface, and the scientific results it returned to Earth still stand at the first stepping stone in returning humans through the Artemis program.

Originally intended as a scientific investigation of the Moon, the Surveyor lander program was revised following President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 address announcing the US’s goal of placing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. But before humans could take those first steps on the lunar surface, a lander needed to make that dangerous journey first to teach us how to land and return someone from the Moon safely.

The first Surveyors were tasked with touching down on the lunar surface via a soft landing, then exploring the terrain to determine the risk to human contact. This first attempt to land on a celestial body had an assumed success rate of about 10-15%, according to former co-principal investigator on the Surveyor television experiment, Justin (Jay) Rennilson. But Surveyor had been sent on a direct trajectory – it did not enter lunar orbit before landing, but hurtled directly toward the surface at 6,000 mph. With the precision work of the JPL team, the thrusters fired at just the right moment and maintained perfect orientation to communicate with Earth all the way down.

Surveyor 1 successfully landed on the moon on June 2, 1966, marking America's first controlled touchdown on the lunar surface 60 years ago. After the failure of the first six Ranger spacecraft en route to the moon, the success of the first Surveyor landing was an incredible relief. Between this milestone and 1968, NASA and JPL launched seven Surveyor missions from Cape Canaveral.

The JPL Archives is part of preserving the history of that achievement. Beginning in 2015, Rennilson and his son Gary ventured to create a panorama based on Surveyor data held in both JPL’s Planetary Data System (PDS) and the JPL Archives. To this day, the Archives continues to provide digitized data to the Space Imagery Center at the University of Arizona, where the Rennilson team continues work on The Surveyor Archive Project. CL#26-1978