Lunar Orbiter 2

Mission summary

After a 92.6-hour flight, the spacecraft entered an elliptical orbit around the Moon, coming as close as 196 km and as far as 1850 km at an 11.8-degree tilt. Five days and 33 orbits later, its lowest point was dropped to 49.7 km. An amplifier failure on December 7, the last day of data readout, cost six pictures. The next day, the orbit’s tilt was adjusted to 17.5 degrees to study lunar gravity.

Photography ran from November 18 to 25, 1966, with readouts finishing on December 7. The mission returned 609 high-resolution and 208 medium-resolution frames, most of excellent quality and sharp enough to see details as small as one meter. One standout was a dramatic oblique shot of Copernicus crater, taken on November 23 from 45 km up, later called one of the century’s great photos. All other experiments worked well, recording three micrometeorite hits.

The craft continued tracking until it was deliberately crashed into the Moon on October 11, 1967, at 3.0 degrees north latitude and 119.1 degrees east longitude. In 2011, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera found and photographed the crash site, where debris from a steep impact spreads out like butterfly wings.