PASADENA (California): Camera-carrying Surveyor VI landed gently on the Moon yesterday [Nov 9], giving the United States its second space success within 24 hours.

In the other space success, America’s Saturn V super-rocket hurled an unmanned Apollo moonship 11,234 miles into space yesterday and the spacecraft survived a blistering diveback through the earth’s atmosphere to a parachute landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Besides a camera, the Surveyor VI carried a soil test kit to study a potential astronaut site.

The target area in Sinus Medii, or Central Bay, almost dead centre on the front face of the Moon, was much rougher than previous Surveyor sites. Scientists said the much-cratered region should be surveyed, however, to give Apollo astronauts a planned series of optional landing sites along the lunar equator.

Within an hour after the landing, Surveyor VI was sending back pictures of a massive lunar cliff just over a mile from its landing point.

Surveyor VI was launched on Tuesday.

Earlier, the Saturn splashdown in the Pacific followed a fiery dash-back through the atmosphere in which the spacecraft reached lunar return speed of nearly 25,000 miles an hour and had its heat shield blistered by 5,000-degree (pre-entry) temperatures.

In a special message of congratulations to the space team, President Johnson said the flight “symbolises the power this nation is harnessing for the peaceful exploration of space”.

The test demonstrated that the Apollo ship can withstand the searing re-entry heat that astronauts will encounter in coming home from the Moon, one of many significant achievements of the momentous mission.

The impact occurred in the Pacific only 6 miles from the prime recovery ship, the aircraft carrier “U.S.S. Bennington”, at 2037 GMT, after a flight of 8 hours, 37 minutes.

Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2017