Background

in the early 1960s, when I was a fresh Caltech graduate student spending summers working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I worked on the Ranger Project. This was a “hard lander” spacecraft, the first to be sent to the moon, in order to understand better the nature of the surface in preparation for the later Apollo manned lunar mission.

I worked with a recent engineering and ROTC graduate from Purdue, Don Willingham, on a variety of research efforts to develop the Ranger television system, to figure out how to optimize the pictures returned in real time, and to analyze the pictures with early digital image processing technologies after the missions to extract topographic and geologic information.

The Ranger project has been lost for the most part in the “dust bins” of history, but in fact it contributed substantially to the early development of the US space program and scientific image data analysis techniques. The 30-minute video at this link was done by one of Don Willingham’s colleagues in Washington state (Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof, Unitarian Universalist Church of Spokane), an amateur video documentarian, to help memorialize the Ranger project.