Ranger 1
Ranger 1 — the first of NASA/JPL's Ranger lunar probes (23 August 1961). A test flight for the new spacecraft, it was stranded in a low, decaying Earth orbit when its Agena upper stage failed to restart, and re-entered within days — never heading for the Moon.
Key facts
Mission & specifications
Mission
- Operator
- NASA / JPL
- Launched
- August 23, 1961
- Status
- Lost
Trajectory
- Distance from the Sun
- 0.997 AU
- Computed from the cached position
- Distance from Earth
- 1,821,850 km
- Computed from cached positions
- Distance from Venus
- 0.278 AU
- Computed from cached positions
Mission
Ranger 1 opened NASA's first dedicated lunar programme — and opened it with a failure, the first of a punishing run. The Rangers were meant to fly straight at the Moon and send pictures all the way down to impact, a brute-force way to see the surface far more clearly than any telescope could. Ranger 1 was a test of the new spacecraft in Earth orbit before the lunar shots began. Launched on 23 August 1961, it reached orbit, but its Agena upper stage failed to re-ignite for the burn that would have lifted it to a high test orbit. Stranded low, it re-entered the atmosphere within a week. It was an unglamorous start to a programme that would fail again and again before it succeeded — but the engineering lessons of each loss were folded into the next attempt.
Images
Images from open archives · credit shown per image