Surveyor 6 Launches Toward the Moon
On November 7, 1967, NASA launched Surveyor 6, a robotic lander. It touched down on the Moon on November 10 and later lifted off briefly and landed again a short distance away.
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The Surveyor Program
NASA's Surveyor program, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, sent robotic landers to the Moon in 1966 to 1968 to prepare for Apollo. Its purposes were to show that a spacecraft could make a soft landing, to photograph the surface, and to learn whether the ground could support the weight of a lunar module. Seven spacecraft were launched, and five of them, Surveyors 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7, landed successfully. Surveyor 6 was the fourth of those.
Launch and Landing
Surveyor 6 was launched from Cape Kennedy on November 7, 1967, on an Atlas-Centaur rocket. It reached the Moon on November 10, after a flight of about three days, and landed in Sinus Medii, the Central Bay, a flat region near the center of the side of the Moon facing Earth. This area was one of those being considered for Apollo landings. The lander weighed about one ton at launch and had a television camera, a soil-analysis instrument and a scoop on an arm for testing the surface.
Photographs and Soil
In the following days Surveyor 6 sent back more than 30,000 pictures of its surroundings, including panoramas and views of the lander's own footpads. Its instrument for measuring the elements in the soil found that the material was similar in composition to basalt, as Surveyor 5 had found at a different site earlier in 1967. The pictures were used by Apollo planners to study the texture and slope of the ground.
The Hop
On November 17 controllers fired the lander's engines for about two and a half seconds. NASA reports that Surveyor 6 rose to a height of roughly three to four meters, moved sideways about two and a half meters, and settled down again. It is recorded as the first time a spacecraft took off from the surface of another world. The cameras photographed the soil disturbed by the engines and the first landing site from the new position. Surveyor 6 operated until the lunar night began in mid-December 1967.
What Followed
Surveyor 7, the last of the series, was launched on January 7, 1968, and landed on the rim of the crater Tycho on January 10. Apollo 11 astronauts made the first crewed landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969. In November 1969 the crew of Apollo 12 landed close to Surveyor 3, which had arrived on the Moon in April 1967, and removed pieces of it, including its camera, to bring back to Earth for study.
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