Latest Surveyor Program Stories

Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com NASA announced guidelines established to try and protect lunar historic sites as engineers and scientists aim their sites for the moon. The new guidelines will be taken into account by the X Prize Foundation as it judges mobility plans submitted by 26 teams trying to become the first privately-funded entity to visit the moon. NASA said it recognizes that both nations and the companies have ambitions to reach the moon, so it wanted to develop the...

Imagine landing on the Moon, climbing down the ladder of your spacecraft, and looking around the harsh lunar landscape"”to see another, older spacecraft standing only 200 yards away.That's exactly what happened in November 1969, when astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean stepped out of the Apollo 12 lunar module. There, within walking distance on the edge of a small crater, stood Surveyor 3, an unmanned U.S. spacecraft that had landed in April 1967.Apollo 12's landing site had been chosen...

LOS ANGELES -- NASA is investigating whether incorrect software commands may have doomed the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which abruptly fell silent last year after a decade of meticulously mapping the Red Planet.The space agency said that theory is just one of several that may explain the probe's failure. NASA on Wednesday announced the formation of an internal review board to investigate why the Global Surveyor lost contact with controllers during a routine adjustment of its solar...