Ranger 5
| Ranger 5 | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Ranger 5 |
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| NSSDC ID | 1962-055A | ||||||
| Mission goal | Photographing the moon | ||||||
| Client | NASA | ||||||
| Launcher | Atlas - Agena-B | ||||||
| construction | |||||||
| Takeoff mass | 342 kg | ||||||
| Course of the mission | |||||||
| Start date | October 18, 1962 | ||||||
| launch pad | CCAFC LC-12 | ||||||
| End date | October 21, 1962 | ||||||
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Ranger 5 was a space probe from the US space agency NASA . It was the fifth probe in the Ranger program to explore the moon . Like Ranger 3 and Ranger 4 , it was built in the so-called Block II design and weighed 342 kilograms. Like its predecessors, the probe should take pictures of the surface of the moon and transmit them to the earth. It was planned to drop a capsule with seismic instruments shortly before impact on the moon . With an autonomous battery supply, this should have transmitted data to earth for around 30 days. As in the previous two missions, images of the surface should be taken in the last ten minutes prior to impact with the surface.
The mission
Ranger 5 took off from the LC-12 launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on October 18, 1962, aboard an Atlas - Agena-B missile .
After reaching earth orbit, it was shot on an orbit towards the moon. After eight hours and 44 minutes, however, the power supply collapsed, so that important course correction maneuvers could not be carried out. Ranger 5 missed the moon by 725 kilometers and entered a heliocentric orbit. The gamma ray spectrometer provided values to the ground station for four hours .
Web links
- NASA: Ranger 5 (English)
- Bernd Leitenberger: The Ranger moon probes
- Lunar Impact - A History of Project Ranger , online version of a NASA book