If the Thor-Agena was also counted in, there had been a total of nine times that an Agena B stage had malfunctioned in flight. They also found that JPL's handling of the program was poor, the spacecraft lacked redundant systems in the event of a malfunction, NASA's deep-space tracking network crews were not trained adequately and had deficiencies in their equipment, and finally, the Atlas-Agena booster's reliability was poor, having malfunctioned on eight Air Force and NASA launches as November 1962 ended. They also concluded that heat sterilization was damaging to the delicate spacecraft systems and should be abandoned at once. The board's findings included the verdict that the Ranger design was "more complicated than necessary" for a lunar mission and also required a very high degree of engineering and workmanship, neither of which were being delivered. Kelley, with the mission of establishing by November 30 the reasons for the continued program failures. NASA established a Ranger Board of Inquiry on October 29, 1962, headed by Albert J. Numerous theories were put forward about the cause of the failures, including poor management at JPL, overly-ambitious spacecraft designs that were unworkable and unreliable with contemporary technology, and some lesser reasons such as heat sterilization of the probes. The Cuban Missile Crisis had momentarily diverted attention from the failure of Ranger 5, but that mission forced a wholesale review of the entire Ranger program. Please discuss this issue on the article's talk page. Please consider splitting content into sub-articles, condensing it, or adding subheadings. This section may be too long to read and navigate comfortably.
Sufficient video bandwidth was provided to allow for rapid framing sequences of both narrow- and wide-angle television pictures. The telecommunications equipment converted the composite video signal from the camera transmitters into an RF signal for subsequent transmission through the spacecraft high-gain antenna.
#ATLAS AGENA RANGER TV#
Transmitters aboard the spacecraft included a 60 W TV channel F at 959.52 MHz, a 60 W TV channel P at 960.05 MHz, and a 3 W transponder channel 8 at 960.58 MHz. Ĭommunications were through the quasi omnidirectional low-gain antenna and the parabolic high-gain antenna. Two 1000 watt-hour AgZnO batteries stored power for spacecraft operations. Two 1200 watt-hour AgZnO batteries rated at 26.5 V with a capacity for 9 hours of operation provided power to each of the separate communication/TV camera chains. Power was supplied by 9,792 silicon solar cells contained in the two solar panels, giving a total array area of 2.3 square meters and producing 200 W. Orientation and attitude control about three axes were enabled by twelve nitrogen gas jets coupled to a system of three gyros, four primary Sun sensors, two secondary Sun sensors, and an Earth sensor. Propulsion for the mid-course trajectory correction was provided by a 224 N thrust monopropellant hydrazine engine with four jet-vane vector control. The overall height of the spacecraft was 3.6 m. A cylindrical quasi omnidirectional antenna was seated on top of the conical tower.
#ATLAS AGENA RANGER FULL#
Two solar panel wings, each 739 mm wide by 1537 mm long, extended from opposite edges of the base with a full span of 4.6 m, and a pointable high-gain dish antenna was hinge mounted at one of the corners of the base away from the solar panels. The spacecraft consisted of a hexagonal aluminum frame base 1.5 m across on which was mounted the propulsion and power units, topped by a truncated conical tower that held the TV cameras. Rangers 6, 7, 8, and 9 were called Block 3 versions of the Ranger spacecraft.
Spacecraft design Ranger 6 in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Due to a failure of the camera system, no images were returned. No other experiments were carried on the spacecraft. The cameras were arranged in two separate chains, or channels, each self-contained with separate power supplies, timers, and transmitters so as to afford the greatest reliability and probability of obtaining high-quality television pictures. The spacecraft carried six television vidicon cameras - two wide-angle (channel F, cameras A and B) and four narrow-angle (channel P) - to accomplish these objectives. It was launched on Januand was designed to transmit high-resolution photographs of the lunar terrain during the final minutes of flight until impacting the surface.
#ATLAS AGENA RANGER SERIES#
Ranger 6 was a lunar probe in the NASA Ranger program, a series of robotic spacecraft of the early and mid-1960s to obtain the first close-up images of the Moon's surface.
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