The Need for Pictures

U.S. space scientists may not be able to explain the last-minute failure of Ranger 6 for weeks -- if ever. As the spacecraft hurtled toward the moon's Sea of Tranquillity, it sent back a vast amount of data; it reported on its changing internal temperature, its bat tery voltages, the position of its antennas. But none of the information that Ranger sent back has yet accounted for the failure of its TV cam eras. "We're still studying it," said Director William Pickering of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "I'm trying to leave the boys alone." Whatever the reason,the failure shook every branch of U.S. space bureaucracy. Detailed information about the moon's surface is desperately needed to guide the design of moon-landing vehicles. "We must have close-up pictures of the moon's surface," said one high space administrator. "We're not going to commit a man to make a flight without this knowledge." Such caution may well force modifications in the rigid time schedule that has been set for putting a man on the moon before 1970.

Blind Landing. There is another faction in the space administration that brooks no delays, that favors sending men to the moon without advance in formation about its surface. Wernher von Braun, head of the Marshall Space Flight Center, thinks that the first lunar-landing vehicle can make its touch down cautiously, its rocket engine slowing it almost to a halt while the crew men select a good place to land. If they see their landing gear disappearing into impalpable dust, they can rise, move sideways and try another landing somewhere else.

Few other students of the lunar-landing problem endorse such a tactic.

Large parts of the moon may look smooth, even through the biggest tele scopes, but this may be for the same reason that a building ten miles away looks to the naked eye as if it had no windows.

One possibility is that the moon may prove to have no smooth places at all.

The level plains on the earth are nearly all caused by erosion, a phenomenon that requires an atmosphere and there fore does not exist on the moon. The flat-looking lunar seas may turn out to be thickly covered with steep-sided pits, or with jagged plates of lava like many of the earth's lava flows, or with fragile rock froth unlike anything that exists on earth.

The moon's surface was formed under nonearthly conditions, and it may be different from the earth's surface in ways that the most open-minded sci entists cannot imagine. To land on it without having seen close-up pictures first would be something less than a prudent space project.

Next Time. While JPL experts are trying to find out what happened to their TV cameras, they can take pride in the rest of Ranger's performance. After completing its complicated mid-course correction without error, it hit the moon within a few miles of the planned target. Its radio transmitter never faltered, and its instruments reported faithfully. In the estimation of many space engineers, this is a greater achievement than sending any number of astronauts on passive trips around the earth. Since the TV cameras are not a notably unreliable part of the spacecraft's equipment, there is a good chance that they will work properly on the next Ranger flight, which is scheduled for March.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.