The Moon -- Through the Looking Glass

SURVEYOR 3 was sent to the moon 31 months ago and was not seen again until Astronaut Richard Gordon, in lunar orbit aboard Yankee Clipper last week, spotted it through his tracking sextant. Yet NASA months ago had planned the entire Apollo 12 mission around a successful landing near Surveyor. How could the space agency know the exact location of this tiny target in the vastness of the Ocean of Storms? The answer lies in a remarkable bit of space-age detective work.

Having tracked Surveyor's flight by radar, Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Lab determined that Surveyor had landed some where in a three-square-mile area in the south eastern corner of the Ocean of Storms. From the pictures that Survey or had transmitted, they also knew that it was standing in a crater about 100 yds. wide. Unfortunately, there were about 1,000 craters of that size within the probable landing area. Which one held the mooncraft?

University of Arizona Astronomer Ewen A. Whitaker set about to find out. Examining panoramic photographs taken by the spacecraft's TV camera from just 5 ft. off the ground, he saw a pair of large rocks inside Surveyor's crater. Looking further, he noticed that the rocks and two small craters on the floor of the crater were aligned along an imaginary path pointing directly north. "That's all we had to go on, really," says Whitaker. "We had no way of telling the size of these landmarks or the distance between them."

Using a dime-store magnifying glass given to him by a friend, Whitaker began studying photographs of roughly the same area taken from above the moon by Lunar Orbiter 3. The glass proved a valuable gift. Within 20 hours after Surveyor's landing, Whitaker located a crater with the distinctive boulder and crater pattern. Surveyor, he confidently told NASA flight planners, was on the east side of that crater. With equal confidence-- based on the navigation lessons learned from the flight of Apollo 11--NASA made plans for a precision landing that would place the lunar module within walking distance of Surveyor.

When the Apollo 12 astronauts landed and walked to the edge of the crater, Whitaker pre dicted last week, they would see the spacecraft.

"If they don't," he said, "boy, I'm dead." At week's end, Whitaker was much alive.

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