Before Apollo 11 launched and landed on the moon, the scientists at NASA needed to map out the surface of the moon so that they would know where would be the best spot to land the spacecraft. In order to do that they launched five satellites to orbit the moon and used the photographs taken by the orbiters to calculate the best spot for the landing of Apollo 11.
The Lunar Orbiters weren’t the first photo-focused spacecraft aimed at the moon, but they were unique because of the equipment they were carrying.
“They basically borrowed spy cameras from the Defense Department, from their satellite program,” says David Williams, the acting head of the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive. At the time, the U.S. Department of Defense was using similar cameras in the CORONA program, known to the public as Discoverer, to take satellite photos of the Soviet Union.
Each Lunar Orbiter had two cameras, one with a high-resolution lens and one with medium resolution. Rather than standard 35-millimeter film, the satellites used 70-millimeter, the same size that’s used today to make IMAX movies.
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
