... The Surveyor probes were the first U.S. spacecraft to land safely on the Moon . The main objectives of the Surveyors were to obtain close-up images of the lunar surface and to determine if the terrain was safe for manned landings. ... The successful missions and landing dates are: Surveyor 1 on June 2, 1966; Surveyor 3 on April 19, 1967; Surveyor 5 on September 10, 1967; Surveyor 6 on November 9, 1967; and Surveyor 7 on January 9, 1968. ... Surveyor 7 Panorama of Tycho Crater . ...

... Launch Date: 1966-08-10 . ... The Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft was designed primarily to photograph smooth areas of the lunar surface for selection and verification of safe landing sites for the Surveyor and Apollo missions. ... The spacecraft was placed in a cislunar trajectory and injected into an elliptical lunar orbit for data acquisition. ... An 80-millimeter lens system was used to obtain Medium-Resolution (MR) photos, and a 610-millimeter lens system was used for High-Resolution (HR) photos. ...

... Spacecraft . ... To space by cannon? Finally, the deep space explorers --spacecraft which break away from the Earth's gravity . ... The "Luna" series of the USSR conducted 7 soft landing of unmanned probes, two of them with wheeled robotic "Lunokhods," and two of those missions returned samples to Earth. Others spacecraft have visited the major planets of the Solar system. ... The Mariner series have explored Venus and Mars--and Mariner 10 even reached Mercury, for three separate encounters! ...

Cosmic Research, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2004, pp. 435­488. Translated from Kosmicheskie Issledovaniya, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2004, pp. 453­508. Original Russian Text Copyright © 2004 by Veselovsky, Panasyuk, Avdyushin, Bazilevskaya, Belov, Bogachev, Bogod, Bogomolov, Bothmer, Boyarchuk, Vashenyuk, Vlasov, Gnezdilov, Gorgutsa, Grechnev, Denisov, Dmitriev, Dryer, Yermolaev, Eroshenko, Zherebtsov, Zhitnik, Zhukov, Zastenker, Zelenyi, Zeldovich, Ivanov-Kholodnyi, Ignat'ev, Ishkov, Kolomiytsev, Krasheninnikov, Kudela,