Lunar Orbiter program
The first three missions were dedicated to imaging 20 potential crewed lunar landing sites, selected based on Earth-based observations.
The equipment deck at the base of the craft held the battery, transponder, flight programmer, inertial reference unit (IRU), Canopus star tracker, command decoder, multiplex encoder, traveling-wave tube amplifier (TWTA), and the photographic system.
Propulsion for major maneuvers was provided by the gimballed velocity control engine, a hypergolic 440 newtons (100 lbf) thrust Marquardt Corp. rocket motor.
Kodak created and constructed built eight photographic subsystems for the Lunar Orbiter program, five of which were used in space missions of 1966 and 1967.
The wide-angle, medium resolution mode used an 80 mm F 2.8 Xenotar lens manufactured by Schneider Kreuznach of West Germany.
[4] The cameras exposed negatives on 65 mm Kodak Bimat film, which was then developed onboard using a semidry process.
[3][5] The receiving stations on Earth then transferred the video images back onto film, which was then shipped to Kodak in Rochester for final processing and printing.
[3] This system was adapted under permission of the NRO from the SAMOS E-1 reconnaissance camera, built by Kodak for a short-lived USAF near-realtime satellite imaging project.
[6] The Lunar Orbiter program consisted of five spacecraft which returned photography of 99 percent of the surface of the Moon (near and far side) with resolution down to 1 meter (3 ft 3 in).
The Lunar Orbiters were all eventually commanded to crash on the Moon before their attitude control fuel ran out so they would not present navigational or communications hazards to later Apollo flights.
The Lunar Orbiter program was managed by NASA Langley Research Center at a total cost of roughly $200 million.
The resulting outstanding views were of generally very high spatial resolution and covered a substantial portion of the lunar surface, but they suffered from a "venetian blind" striping, missing or duplicated data, and frequent saturation effects that hampered their use.
[10] In 2000, the Astrogeology Research Program of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona was funded by NASA (as part of the Lunar Orbiter Digitization Project Archived 2017-11-23 at the Wayback Machine) to scan at 25 micrometer resolution archival LO positive film strips that were produced from the original data.
[11] The goal was to produce a global mosaic of the Moon using the best available Lunar Orbiter frames (largely the same coverage as that of Bowker and Hughes, 1971).
[12] In addition, the USGS digitization project created frames from very high resolution Lunar Orbiter images for several 'sites of scientific interest.'
[14] Almost all of the Lunar Orbiter images had been successfully recovered As of February 2014[update] and were undergoing digital processing before being submitted to NASA's Planetary Data System.
