Ranger 9, the last spacecraft in the Ranger series, was launched on March 21, 1965, and impacted the Moon on March 24, landing just 3 miles from its predicted point in the Alonsus crater. The ...

Before Apollo astronauts set foot upon the moon, much remained unknown about the lunar surface. While most scientists believed the moon had a solid surface that would support astronauts and their ...

Whereas the early Pioneer missions were attempts to simply reach the Moon’s vicinity, NASA’s Ranger missions of the 1960s were efforts to study the Moon with probes and then deliberately crash them ...

This excerpt from "NASA: The 25th Year" shows the final sequence of images from one of the successful Ranger spacecraft that impacted the Moon 1964-1965. The Ranger spacecraft were designed to fly ...