Retrotechtacular: Exploring The Moon On Surveyor 1

September 7, 2025 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

Aside from a few stand-out programs — looking at you, Star Trek — by the late 1960s, TV had already become the “vast wasteland” predicted almost a decade earlier by Newton Minnow. But for the technically inclined, the period offered no end of engaging content in the form of wall-to-wall coverage of anything and everything to do with the run-up to the Apollo moon landings. It was the best thing on TV, and even the endless press conferences beat watching a rerun of Gilligan’s Island.

At the time, most of the attention landed on the manned missions, with the photogenic and courageous astronauts of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs very much in the limelight. But for our money, it was the unmanned missions where the real heroics were on display, starring the less-photogenic but arguably vastly more important engineers and scientists who made it all possible. It probably didn’t do much for the general public, but it sure inspired a generation of future scientists and engineers.

With that in mind, we were pleased to see this Surveyor 1 documentary from Retro Space HD pop up in our feed the other day. It appears to be a compilation of news coverage and documentaries about the mission, which took place in the summer of 1966 and became the first lunar lander to set down softly on the Moon’s surface. The rationale of the mission boiled down to one simple fact: we had no idea what the properties of the lunar surface were. The Surveyor program was designed to take the lay of the land, and Surveyor 1 in particular was tasked with exploring the mechanical properties of the lunar regolith, primarily to make sure that the Apollo astronauts wouldn’t be swallowed whole when they eventually made the trip President Kennedy had mandated back in 1961.

The video below really captures the spirit of these early missions, a time when there were far more unknowns than knowns, and disaster always seemed to be right around the corner. Even the launch system for Surveyor, the Atlas-Centaur booster, was a wild card, having only recently emerged from an accelerated testing program that was rife with spectacular failures. The other thing the film captures well is the spacecraft’s nail-biting descent and landing, attended not only by the short-sleeved and skinny-tied engineers but by a large number of obvious civilians, including a few lucky children. They were all there to witness history and see the first grainy but glorious pictures from the Moon, captured by a craft that seemed to have only just barely gotten there in one piece.

The film is loaded with vintage tech gems, of course, along with classic examples of the animations used at the time to illustrate the abstract concepts of spaceflight to the general public. These sequences really bring back the excitement of the time, at least for those of us whose imaginations were captured by the space program and the deeds of these nervous men and women.

NASA wants to return to the moon. They also want you to help. Turns out making a good landing on the moon is harder than you might think.

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NASA Is Now Tasked With Developing A Lunar Time Standard, Relativity Or Not

May 2, 2024 by Lewin Day 82 Comments

A little while ago, we talked about the concept of timezones and the Moon. It’s a complicated issue, because on Earth, time is all about the Sun and our local relationship with it. The Moon and the Sun have their own weird thing going on, so time there doesn’t really line up well with our terrestrial conception of it.

Nevertheless, as humanity gets serious about doing Moon things again, the issue needs to be solved. To that end, NASA has now officially been tasked with setting up Moon time – just a few short weeks after we last talked about it! (Does the President read Hackaday?) Only problem is, physics is going to make it a damn sight more complicated!

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How Does Time Work On The Moon?

March 26, 2024 by Lewin Day 46 Comments

We’re looking to go back to the Moon. Not just with robots this time, but with astronauts, too! They’ll be doing all kinds of interesting things when they get there. Maybe they’ll even work towards establishing a more permanent presence for humanity on the lunar surface, in which case they’ll have to get up in the morning, eat breakfast, and get to work.

This raises the question—how does time work on the Moon? As simple as they can be down here, Earthly days and years have little meaning up there, after all. So what’s going on up there?

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Hackaday Links: April 9, 2023

April 9, 2023 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

When it comes to cryptocurrency security, what’s the best way to secure the private key? Obviously, the correct answer is to write it on a sticky note and put it on the bezel of your monitor; nobody’ll ever think of looking there. But, if you’re slightly more paranoid, and you have access to a Falcon 9, you might just choose to send it to the Moon. That’s what is supposed to happen in a few months’ time, as private firm Lunar Outpost’s MAPP, or Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, heads to the Moon. The goal is to etch the private key of a wallet, cheekily named “Nakamoto_1,” on the rover and fund it with 62 Bitcoins, worth about $1.5 million now. The wallet will be funded by an NFT sale of space-themed electronic art, because apparently the project didn’t have enough Web3.0 buzzwords yet. So whoever visits the lunar rover first gets to claim the contents of the wallet, whatever they happen to be worth at the time. Of course, it doesn’t have to be a human who visits.

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NASA Called, They Want Their Cockroaches Back

June 25, 2022 by Al Williams 29 Comments

News hit earlier this month that the infamous “cockroach moon dust” was up for auction? Turns out, NASA is trying to block the sale as they assert that they own all the lunar material brought back from the Apollo missions. What? You didn’t know about cockroach moon dust? Well, it is a long and — frankly — weird story.

It may sound silly now, but there was real concern in 1969 that Apollo 11 might bring back something harmful. So much so that NASA tricked out an RV and kept the astronauts and a volunteer in it for about three weeks after they came home. During that time they were tested and some experiments were done to see if they’d been exposed to anything nasty.

One of those experiments was to feed lunar dust to cockroaches (by the way, the table of contents has a mistake in it — check out page 8). Seriously. But that isn’t even the really weird part. A scientist who worked on the project by the name of Marion Brooks decided she wanted a memento, so she extracted the lunar dust from the dead cockroaches and saved it in a vial. At least we learned a new word: chyme.

RR Auction — the RR stands for Remarkable Rarities — was starting the bidding for some dead cockroaches and a vial of chyme at about 12 grand but it was sure to go higher than that, perhaps up to $400,000 USD. That was before they got a cease and desist from NASA.

It appears the collection has been sold at least once before. NASA has cracked down on anyone selling lunar material as even those given to people are considered on loan from the agency. However, many of the rocks given to different countries and state governments are now unaccounted for.

Back in 2002, interns Thad Roberts and Tiffany Fowler worked in the building where NASA stores most of the moon rocks it has. They took a 600-pound safe containing about 100 grams of moon samples and some other materials. With some help, Roberts tried to fence them to an amateur rock collector who helped the FBI set up a sting. Roberts got over 8 years in federal prison for his efforts, just a little more than an accomplice, Gordon McWhorter, who claimed to have been duped by Roberts. There have been a few other cases of theft, most of which remain unsolved.

This is one of those tricky things. From NASA’s point of view, they own all the moon rocks (with a few exceptions, mostly of material that didn’t come from Apollo). If you steal them, they want them back and if you are given them on loan they don’t appreciate you giving them away, selling them, or losing them. On the other hand, outside of outright theft like the Roberts case, it is hard to imagine that you want to control old roach chyme.

There’s two things we do wonder. First, who saves roach chyme even if it did start as lunar dust? Second, if three little pebbles brought back by the Soviet Luna 16 probe sold for over $850,000 and this dust might have gone for $400,000, why aren’t more of these “New Space” startups scrambling to bring some fresh samples back? Seems like it might pay for itself.

Great Beginnings: The Antikythera Mechanism Gets A “Day Zero”

April 14, 2022 by Dan Maloney 29 Comments

When an unknown genius sat down more than 2,000 years ago to design and build an astronomical instrument, chances are good that he or she didn’t think that entire academic institutions devoted to solving its mysteries would one day be established. But such is the enduring nature of the Antikythera mechanism, the gift from antiquity that keeps on giving long after being dredged up from a shipwreck in the Aegean Sea.

And now, new research on the ancient mechanism reveals that like other mechanical calendars, the Antikythera mechanism has a “day zero,” or a minimum possible date that it can display. The analysis by a team led by [Aristeidis Voulgaris] gets deep into the weeds of astronomical cycles, which the mechanism was designed to simulate using up to 37 separate gears, 30 of which have been found. The cycle of concern is the saros, a 223 lunar month cycle of alignments between the Earth, Sun, and Moon. The saros can be used to predict eclipses, astronomical events of immense importance in antiquity, particularly annular eclipses, which occur when the Moon is at apogee and therefore eclipses less of the Sun’s surface.

The researchers looked at historical annular eclipse data and found that saros cycle 58 had a particularly long annular eclipse, on 23 December 178 BCE. The eclipse would have been visible at sunrise in the eastern Mediterranean, and coupled with other astronomical goodies, like the proximity to the winter solstice, the Sun entering Capricorn, and the Moon being new and at apogee, was probably so culturally significant to the builder that it could serve as the initial date for calibrating all the mechanisms pointers and dials.

Others differ with that take, of course, saying that the evidence points even further back, to a start date in the summer of 204 BCE. In any case, if like us you can’t get enough Antikythera, be sure to check out our overview of the mechanism, plus [Clickspring]’s exploration of methods perhaps used to build it.

Antique Map Of Paris With Modern Tech

April 10, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

There’s plenty to love about antiques, from cars, furniture, to art. While it might be a little bit of survivorship bias, it’s easy to appreciate these older things for superior quality materials, craftsmanship, or even simplicity. They are missing out on all of our modern technology, though, so performing “restomods” on classics is a popular activity nowadays. This antique map of Paris, for example, is made of a beautiful hardwood but has been enhanced by some modern amenities as well.

At first the creator of this project, [Marc], just wanted to give it some ambient lighting, but it eventually progressed over the course of two years to have a series of Neopixels hidden behind it that illuminate according to the current sun and moon positions. The Neopixels get their instructions from an ESP8266 which calculates these positions using code [Marc] wrote himself based on the current date. Due to the limitations of the ESP8266 it’s not particularly precise, but it gets the job done to great effect.

To improve on the accuracy, [Marc] notes that an ESP32 could be used instead, but we can give the ESP8266 a pass for now since the whole project is an excellent art installation even if it is slightly off on its calculations. If you need higher accuracy for tracking celestial objects, you can always grab a Raspberry Pi too.