Key facts
- Mission type
- Lunar impactor
- Operator
- NASA
- Harvard designation
- 1962 Mu 1
- Cospar id
- 1962-012A
- Mission duration
- 10 hours (operational) , 64 hours (to impact)
- Manufacturer
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Launch mass
- 331.1 kg (730 lb)
- Dimensions
- 1.52 m × 2.51 m (5.0 ft × 8.2 ft)
- Power
- 135 W
- Launch date
- April 23, 1962, 20:50:00 ( 1962-04-23UTC20:50Z ) UTC
- Rocket
- Atlas LV-3 Agena-B
- Launch site
- Cape Canaveral LC-12
- Impact date
- April 26, 1962, 12:49:53 ( 1962-04-26UTC12:49:54Z ) UTC, Failed before impact
- Impact site
- 15°30′S 130°42′W / 15.5°S 130.7°W / -15.5; -130.7
via Wikipedia infobox
~10 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Ranger
Ranger 4 was a spacecraft of the Ranger program, launched in 1962. It was designed to transmit pictures of the lunar surface to Earth stations during a period of 10 minutes of flight prior to crashing upon the Moon, to rough-land a seismometer capsule on the Moon, to collect gamma-ray data in flight, to study radar reflectivity of the lunar surface, and to continue testing of the Ranger program for development of lunar and interplanetary spacecraft.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Ranger 4” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.