Surveyor Selfie

The photo information says 2008*, but I think it was much longer ago, I was on one of my visits to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

They had a test model of the Surveyor spacecraft, hanging next to the second-floor level at the Museum. Surveyor was an uncrewed three-legged spacecraft. NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used this craft to learn if we could land people safely on the Moon, or if they would sink into dust. Five of the seven craft launched toward the Moon landed successfully, sending thousands of photos from the surface of the Moon. For an exhaustive explanation of what Surveyor did see Drew Ex Machina’s articles, starting with Surveyor 1 at https://www.drewexmachina.com/2016/05/30/surveyor-1-americas-first-lunar-landing/

The camera used a mirror to reflect the view down to a camera protected inside the craft. That day, I noticed the mirror was angled so I could see the area near me. Holding my Canon A40 at my waist, my camera could see my face. Here’s the photo:

Here’s a cropped version of the photo.

I also see I posted this back in 2008 on the NASASpaceflight blog, so it must have been mid-May 2008.

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=11524.msg281807#msg281807

Last time I checked this Surveyor engineering model was still out of the Museum, in the shop for maintenance.

3 thoughts on “Surveyor Selfie

    1. When I was 2 or 3 years old, 1959, or there abouts, my parents left a Kodak Brownie camera on a desk in our living room. I hit the shutter while trying to abscond with the camera. Resulted in a surprised, overexposed face of me at the bottom of the photo. First selfie!

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