Virtually identical to Surveyor 5, this spacecraft carried a television camera, a small bar magnet attached to one footpad, and an alpha-scattering instrument as well as the necessary engineering equipment.

[3] In a further test of space technology, Surveyor 6's engines were restarted and burned for 2.5 seconds in the first lunar liftoff on November 17 at 10:32 UTC.

After moving west eight feet, (2.5 m) the spacecraft once again successfully soft landed and continued functioning as designed.

The TV camera consisted of a vidicon tube, 25 and 100 mm focal length lenses, shutters, polarizing filters (as opposed to color filters used on the previous Surveyor cameras), and iris mounted nearly vertically and surmounted by a mirror that could be adjusted by stepping motors to move in both azimuth and elevation.

A complete video transmission of each 200 line picture required 20 seconds and utilized a bandwidth of 1.2 kHz.

One system, containing two sensors, detected the energy spectra of the alpha particles scattered from the lunar surface, and the other, containing four sensors, detected energy spectra of the protons produced via reactions (alpha and protons) in the surface material.

A digital electronics package, located in a compartment on the spacecraft, continuously telemetered signals to Earth whenever the experiment was operating.

The spectra contained quantitative information on all major elements in the samples except for hydrogen, helium, and lithium.

Curium collected on the collimator films and was scattered by the gold plating on the inside bottom of the sensor head.

[5] This was later noted by the Mars Geyser Hopper mission as a post-soft landing propulsive hop that pre-dated its proposal.