NASA PROBE NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center and Stanford University have developed a sophisticated experiment, Gravity

Probe B (GP-B), to test Einsteins general theory of relativity. It measured how space and time are warped by the presence of the Earth, and, more profoundly, how the Earth's rotation drags space-time around with it. Einsteins theory predicts that space and time are distorted by the presence of massive objects. Launched on April 20, 2004, the GP-B mission is one of NASAs first to address a question of fundamental physics in the new millennium. The GP-B experiment contained the worlds most precise gyroscopes. The gyroscopes were specifically developed to measure two distinct effects of general relativity.The first of these, the geodetic effect, should cause the spin axis orientation of a gyroscope, circling the Earth in a polar orbit, to change by a tiny angle of 6.6 arcseconds (0.0018 degrees) in a year, relative to a distant guide star. The second effect, known as frame-dragging, predicts that massive celestial bodies, such as Earth drag their local spacetime around with themever so slightlyas they rotate. The final results for the GP-B mission were announced in a press event held at NASA Headquarters on May 4, 2011. In this event a distinguished group of panelists discussed the GP-B mission, its results, and its technological and human legacy. Over the course of nearly 50 years, more than 100 Ph.D. theses were published on GP-B technology and science. One GP-B alumnus was the first woman astronaut in space, Dr. Sally Ride. Another alumnus, Dr. Eric Cornell, won a Nobel Prize in Physics for experimental work verifying predictions of another of Einstein's theories, that of Bose-Einstein condensation of matter at very low temperatures.

NASA PROBE SURVEYOR

The Surveyor program was a NASA program that, from 1966 through 1968, sent seven robotic spacecraft to the surface of the Moon. Its primary goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of soft landings on the Moon. The mission called for the craft to travel directly to the Moon on an impact trajectory, on a journey that lasted 63 to 65 hours, and ended with a deceleration of just over three minutes to a soft landing. The program was implemented by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to prepare for the Apollo program. The total cost of the Surveyor program was officially $469 million. Five of the Surveyor craft successfully soft-landed on the moon, including the first one. The other two failed: Surveyor 2 crashed at high velocity after a failed mid-course correction, and Surveyor 4 was lost to contact (possibly exploding) 2.5 minutes before its scheduled touch-down. All seven spacecraft are still on the Moon; none of the missions included returning them to Earth. Some parts of Surveyor 3 were returned to Earth by the crew of Apollo 12, which landed near it in 1969. The camera from this craft is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

Surveyor 1 was the first lunar soft-lander in the unmanned Surveyor program of

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, United States). This lunar soft-lander gathered data about the lunar surface that would be needed for the manned Apollo Moon landings that began in 1969. The successful soft landing of Surveyor 1 on the Ocean of Storms was the first one by an American space probe onto any extraterrestrial body, and it occurred just four months after the first Moon landing by the Soviet Union's Luna 9 probe. This was also a success on NASA's first attempt at a soft landing on any astronomical object.

Surveyor 1 was launched May 30, 1966, from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and it landed on the Moon on June 2, 1966. Surveyor 1
transmitted 11,237 still photos of the lunar surface to the Earth by using a television camera and a sophisticated radio-telemetry system.

The Surveyor program was managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Los Angeles County, but the entire Surveyor space probe was designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Company in El Segundo, California.

Television The TV camera consisted of a vidicon tube, 25 millimeter and 100 millimeter focal-length lenses, a shutter, several optical filters, and iris-system mounted along an axis inclined approximately 16 degrees from the central axis of Surveyor 1. The camera was mounted under a mirror that could be moved in azimuth and elevation. This arrangement created a virtual stereo image pair so that adjacent overlapping images were stereo image pairs and could be viewed as three-dimensional images. This stereo capability permitted some photogrammetric measurements of various lunar features. The TV camera's operation was dependent on the receipt of the proper radio commands from the Earth. Frame-by-frame coverage of the lunar surface was obtained over 360 degrees in azimuth and from +40 degrees above the plane normal to the camera's axis to -65 degrees below this plane. Both 600-line and 200-line modes of operation were used. The 200-line mode transmitted over an omnidirectional antenna for the first 14 photos and scanned one frame every 61.8 seconds. The remaining transmissions were of 600-line pictures over a directional antenna, and each frame was scanned every 3.6 seconds. Each 200-line picture required 20 seconds for a complete video transmission and it used a radio bandwidth of about 1.2 kilohertz. There were seven Surveyor missions; five were successful. Surveyors 2 and 4 failed.