Experimental Blog #129

Mostly notes from "Journey Beyond Selene" - Remarkable Expeditions Past Our Moon and to the Ends of the Solar System by Jeffrey Kluger

Selene apparently is the name of the ancient Greek goddess of our Moon.
In all, the author Jeffrey Kluger, writes about 29 "unmanned missions to the moons" that were launched between August 23, 1961 and October 15, 1997. All, but two, were designed, developed, and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The first nine were all Ranger missions that were designed to take a few minutes{maybe 10 to 15} of pictures before they were deliberately crashed onto the Moon, but of those 9, numbers 1 through 6 were failures for one reason or another.
There were 7 Surveyor missions that were designed to soft-land on the Moon in various places and then take pictures. They were much more successful, but numbers 2 and 4 failed and crashed, undeliberately.
Five Lunar Orbiters were all successfully launched and put into orbit around the Moon.
So , it seems, that the manned American Apollo missions were as well equipped as they could be with lunar maps and photographs.

The Mariner 9 mission was launched May 30, 1971, and it successfully orbited Mars and flew by Phobos, one of Mars' moons.

The Pioneer missions 10 and 11 were designed and developed primarily by the Ames Research Center, also in California. In Richard Corfield's book, "Lives of the Planets", it says that Pioneer 10 achieved a speed of 82,000 miles per hour due to Jupiter's "massive gravity", but only about one half of this speed, at most, seems to be confirmed by other sources.

Also in the second half of "Journey Beyond Selene", Jeffrey Kluger writes about the Voyager missions 2 and 1, which were launched on August 20 and September 5, 1977.
All of these unmanned missions, but especially the Pioneer and Voyager distant solar missions, which crossed 100s of millions, and then billions of miles of space; which, of course, eventually delayed communication for up to an hour, and then more, each way, seem to be virtually miraculous examples of  the application of Newtonian mechanics and equations.

The last 2 missions the author writes about{in 1999}, Galileo and Cassini-Huygens, were still in progress or en route.

Also it is mentioned that "Kurt Debus, the Peenemunde veteran", apparently one of Wernher von Braun's team, was running the Florida launch complex in the 1960s.