and you see the camera that is designed by our intelligence agencies, and then you have all of the NASA hardware around it.” “You see all of the Eastman Kodak hardware that’s in there. When you look inside of a Lunar Orbiter satellite, “it’s an interesting kind of peek at the relationships during the Cold War,” says Matt Shindell, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The burnout of a single film-moving motor, as happened on Lunar Orbiter 3 after it had captured a couple hundred frames, was enough to threaten a mission’s success. The tasks were completed in aluminum tubs about the size of watermelons. The film had to be moved precisely first from the storage spool to the lens, then to a holding area as the remaining photographs were taken, and finally to the development stage, where a layer of chemical-infused gelatin was pressed up against the film. Instead, the Lunar Orbiters used the Kodak BIMAT transfer processing system, which was classified by the Central Intelligence Agency until 2001 because it was primarily created for reconnaissance. “So, they had to devise a system where you develop the film on board the spacecraft.” The floating photo labĭeveloping film usually requires rinsing the negatives in a series of liquid chemicals, which would wreak havoc inside of a satellite in microgravity. “Once you’re at the moon, you could take all the pictures all you want, but you have no way of getting the film back to Earth to develop it,” Williams says. But using film in space came with a major hurdle. Unauthorized use is prohibited.įrom as close as a few hundred miles above the moon’s surface, the Lunar Orbiters captured features down to about three feet wide. Rather than standard 35-millimeter film, the satellites used 70-millimeter, the same size that’s used today to make IMAX movies. Department of Defense was using similar cameras in the CORONA program, known to the public as Discoverer, to take satellite photos of the Soviet Union.Įach Lunar Orbiter had two cameras, one with a high-resolution lens and one with medium resolution. “They basically borrowed spy cameras from the Defense Department, from their satellite program,” says David Williams, the acting head of the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive. The Lunar Orbiters weren’t the first photo-focused spacecraft aimed at the moon, but they were unique because of the equipment they were carrying. But with precise engineering-and some top-secret reconnaissance technology-the Lunar Orbiters provided NASA engineers and scientists the imagery they needed to make the Apollo landings possible. In the pre-digital era, sending photographs from space back to Earth was no casual task. ![]() The Lunar Orbiters also returned images of the far side of the moon, such as this picture taken by Lunar Orbiter 3 in 1967.
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