SURVEYOR 1

Mission

Kind: Lunar lander

State: Successful

Place: Moon

Operator: NASA

Date

Start:

Duration: 7 months, 8 days (launch to last contact)

Mission Ending

Last Contact: 7 January 1967 (1967-01-08)

Rocket

Rocket: Atlas LV-3C Centaur-D

Kind: NASA

Manufacturer: Hughes Aircraft

Mass: 995.2 kilograms (2,194 lb)

Launch Site: Cape Canaveral LC-36A

Flyby

"Requesting permission for flyby." Maverick - Top Gun

Orbit

"You’re going very fast when you’re on orbit, going around the world once every hour and a half." - Robert Crippen

Lander

Place: Lunar

Region: 2°28′26″S 43°20′20″W / 2.474°S 43.339°W / -2.474, -43.339

Date: June 2, 1966, 06:17:36 UTC

Surveyor 1 was the first lunar soft-lander in the uncrewed Surveyor program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, United States). This lunar soft-lander gathered data about the lunar surface that would be needed for the crewed Apollo Moon landings that began in 1969. The successful soft landing of Surveyor 1 on the Ocean of Storms was the first by an American space probe on any extraterrestrial body, occurring on the first attempt and just four months after the first Moon landing by the Soviet Union's Luna 9 probe. Surveyor 1 was launched May 30, 1966, from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and it landed on the Moon on June 2, 1966. Surveyor 1 transmitted 11,237 still photos of the lunar surface to the Earth by using a television camera and a sophisticated radio-telemetry system. The Surveyor program was managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Los Angeles County, California, but the Surveyor space probe was designed by Gary Mizuhara of EOS (Electrical Optical Systems, Covina, Ca.) and built by the Hughes Aircraft Company in El Segundo, California.