Surveyor 1 takes a picture of its shadow after making the first successful soft landing on the moon. (NASA/JPL)

Last week we talked about humankind’s first attempts to land (crash) a spacecraft on the moon, in honor of the successful launch of the Israeli moon lander Beresheet. The Ranger series of spacecraft in the early 1960s showed us a lot more clarity on the makeup of the moon’s surface, but additional key questions still needed answering before we could risk sending people to the moon.

NASA’s follow-up to Ranger was Surveyor. In contrast to Ranger’s intentional crash landings on the moon, Surveyor was meant to attempt soft landings, similar to those astronauts would use. This series of 7 (the ones that worked) gathered a lot of data about landing and about blasting off again from the moon’s surface. Sensibly, NASA wanted to make sure that any people they sent to the moon would be able to make it back to Earth again.

Surveyor 1 was the first spacecraft to make a successful soft landing on the moon, slowing from nearly 6,000 mph to 3 mph on June 2, 1966. It lived for 30 days, sending back thousands of photos and details on the surface of the moon and its temperature.

Surveyor 2 had a bit of a harder landing. On its way to the moon, one of its thrusters failed to ignite, which upset the delicate maneuvering balance and forced it into a spin. NASA engineers weren’t able to keep control, and it crashed into the moon.

Surveyor 3 landed successfully and was the first to use an onboard soil sampler to study how the surface of the moon would do under the weight of an astronaut capsule. Things were looking good.

Surveyor 4 was meant to do additional soil samples, but NASA lost communication about 2.5 minutes before it was meant to land and we assume it blew up and scattered across the surface of the moon. Either that, or some aliens picked up a new toy.

Surveyor 5 was touch and go for a while after launch. There was a leak in the thruster assembly, but NASA scrambled and came up with another way to slow the lander down to make a safe landing. Surveyor 5 had the honor of doing the first official soil analysis using a chemical element analyzer, and was considered one of the most successful of the series thanks to the data this brought in. We learned that the surface of the moon was more likely basaltic, which meant that the theories about layers of fine powder and spacecraft sinking were unlikely to occur anywhere on the moon.

Surveyor 6 verified the conclusions from Surveyor 5 by not only landing on the moon, but launching off from it again. It didn’t go far from its original landing site, only rising up about 10 feet and flying 8 feet away. But the images of its original landing footprint allowed us to take a good look at the lunar soil and proved it was possible to leave the moon’s surface with our rocket boost.

Surveyor 7 was a little different than the other landers, mainly because by January 1968, all the scientific data we needed for our human launch to the moon had already been gathered. Its mission was to perform a variety of scientific experiments on the surface, and it landed in the lunar highlands (like they sound, these are higher elevation plateaus rather than the lunar valleys) instead of the concentrated landing sites NASA had selected as likely for a human mission. It found the surface location to be fairly similar in composition to other areas, but that there tended to be less iron in the highlands.

Next week, we’ll close out these precursor missions to the moon with the Lunar Orbiter series. I hope you’re getting a better idea of the important baby steps that led the way to landing the manned Apollo missions on the moon.

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: Mars is joined by Mercury in the eastern sky until an hour or so after sunset, when Mercury sets. In the predawn mornings, look for a bright Venus with Saturn above it, rising as Venus sinks toward the sun. Jupiter will remain above both planets, brighter than Saturn but outshined by Venus in that southeast sky before sunrise. The moon is currently a waxing crescent and will be first quarter Thursday.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.