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Surveyor 5

Surveyor 5

Equipped with a chemical element analyzer for conducting analyses of the lunar soil, the Surveyor 5 lander was the first spacecraft to do a soil analysis on the moon, or any other world.

Mission Statistics

Launch Date

Sept. 8, 1967

Type

Lander/Rover

Target

Moon

Status

Past

About the mission

Equipped with a chemical element analyzer for conducting analyses of the lunar soil, the Surveyor 5 lander was the first spacecraft to do a soil analysis on the moon, or any other world. At the outset, the mission nearly failed due to a leak in the spacecraft's thruster system, but engineers devised an alternate braking sequence to land the spacecraft safely.

Returning more than 20,000 photographs taken over three days and making one of the most significant finds of the Surveyor missions (that the moon's surface was likely basaltic rather than powdery and therefore conducive to human exploration), Surveyor 5 became one of the most successful missions of the series.

Instruments

  • Television
  • Alpha-scattering surface analyzer
  • Hardness and bearing strength of lunar surface

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› Fact Sheet
› JPL History
› Surveyor 5 Information on Solar System Exploration
› Surveyor 5 Information on National Space Science Data Center

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