What Happened On March 24th?

Just three short years after the Earth was orbited for the first time, a grainy black and white image flickered across television screens around the world on March 24th, 1965. The image wasn’t a majestic view of the lunar surface, but a close-up photo of rugged lunar terrain, moments before a crash landing. This was the finale of NASA’s Ranger 9 mission, a controlled crash designed to gather high-resolution images of the Moon’s surface through a feat of television, so that spectators around the world could follow virtually!

The Ranger program, often overshadowed by the success of Apollo, allowed for our modern human lunar exploration. Ranger 9, the last mission of Block 3 in the series, wasn’t just about the grand finale.

Prior to Ranger, our best glimpses of the Moon were blurry telescopic images. Ranger 9 was equipped with six television cameras and the goal was to capture high quality images of the unexplored celestial body. These cameras were programmed to take pictures with increasing frequency as the spacecraft got nearer and nearer to the lunar surface, promising to deliver the first close-up images of the Moon ever.

The entire imaging sequence on Ranger 9 lasted 17 minutes in total. After a flawless 64-hour flight, the capsule began transmitting pictures at an altitude of 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers). The final image was captured 12 inches above the lunar surface, providing high levels of detail that had never been achieved or seen before!

For the first time ever, a spacecraft landing was broadcast live on television. Millions around the world watched as the Ranger 9 images flickered across their screens, waiting for that dramatic moment of impact.

With this mission deemed as successful, scientists from NASA were encouraged and took initiatives for further explorations. In 1969, Armstrong became the first person to walk on the Moon, and two years after that, Alan Shepard hit a golf shot on it!

While the primary objective of Ranger 9 was to snap high-resolution images, the mission also had a secondary scientific goal. The spacecraft was deliberately targeted to crash-land near the Alphonsus crater, a geological feature of particular interest to scientists. Studying the debris from the impact could potentially reveal details about the composition of the lunar surface.