Surveyor III Images

with thanks to Keith Aldworth

Keith Aldworth scanned his Polaroids, and provided the captions, of these images received at Tidbinbilla from Surveyor III.

Surveyor III landed in Mare Insularum in Oceanus Procellarum on Thursday 20 April 1967.

Two and half years later, the spacecraft was visited by Pete Conrad and Alan Bean when they landed Apollo 12’s Lunar Module, “Intrepid”, a short distance away.

Keith recalls how these Polaroids were obtained:

“We at DSS 42 continued that first lot of photo taking as we took over from Goldstone.

At the time, I worked on the magnetic tape recorders at Tid. That is how we all had copies of the photos for ourselves. Just a matter of replaying the tapes post track.

I recall that we had two methods of recording those photos. One was with the Ampex FR1400 (1/2" tape) and also with the Ampex FR800 (2" tape). The FR 800 was a nightmare machine, as it was quite unreliable. Unlike the FR600s which we used at Parkes and Tid during Apollo, it was not a helical scan recorder. Instead, the tape was fed past the rotating head at a right angle after being formed to shape around it. The slightest imperfection in the tape could lead to catastrophe for the spinning head. I don’t remember the rpm of the head but it was very fast. I think Ampex designed it to be used on the dewline radar installations. When it worked well, it did a great job but my memories of the difficulties we had are manifold.

We used to get pretty good results with the FR1400, using an FM recording technique and running the tape at high speed. From memory it was 60 inches per second. The Polaroid photos came from replaying those tapes.”