Lunar Orbiter 4

Lunar Orbiter 4

Spacecraft· NASA / JPLcompleted

Lunar Orbiter 4 — the first Lunar Orbiter in a polar orbit (launched 4 May 1967), mapping nearly the entire near side and returning the first images of the Moon's south pole. Contact was lost in July 1967 and the craft later impacted the Moon uncontrolled; its exact end is uncertain.

Open in 3D viewSee Lunar Orbiter 4 in the live, interactive 3D map

Key facts

Distance from Sun
1.01 AU
Status
Completed
Launched
1967

Mission & specifications

Mission

Operator
NASA / JPL
Launched
May 4, 1967
Status
Completed

Trajectory

Distance from the Sun
1.01 AU
Distance from Earth
85,442 km
Distance from Venus
0.602 AU

Mission

Lunar Orbiter 4 shifted the programme from picking landing sites to mapping the whole Moon for science. Launched on 4 May 1967, it was the first of the series placed in a near-polar orbit, letting it sweep almost the entire near side and return the first good images of the south-polar region. Its end was less tidy than the others. Rather than being commanded to a clean impact, Lunar Orbiter 4 lost contact in mid-July 1967 — a thermal and control problem the team could not overcome — and its orbit slowly decayed until it struck the Moon uncontrolled, around October 1967. The exact time and place of that impact are not known with certainty, an honest gap in the record for a mission that had already returned its maps.

Images

The Lunar Orbiter spacecraft — Lunar Orbiter 4 flew the first polar mapping orbit
NASA (public domain) · Wikimedia Commons

Images from open archives · credit shown per image