No equivalent for Surveyor. NASA commissioned histories of Ranger and Lunar Orbiter, but somewhat bizarrely not for Surveyor. I don't know how good the records are on Surveyor. By now if NASA was going to do something, they would be better off going for a history of Surveyor and then looking at post-Apollo lunar efforts (which were thwarted).
There's an Apogee book on Surveyorhttp://www.cgpublishing.com/Books/Surveyor.html
Quote from: mikes on 03/01/2015 10:45 pmThere's an Apogee book on Surveyorhttp://www.cgpublishing.com/Books/Surveyor.htmlI have that. It's the reports from the missions, not a history of the program. The program history is interesting. Surveyor started out as a much more complicated science mission. I think it included both orbiter and lander. It got scaled down to primarily support Apollo by testing the lunar surface. There were later proposals for long-lived Surveyors and even a Surveyor rover, but these never got funded. There was some work done on the rover.Still, I'd recommend the Surveyor book if you're interested in the subject.
There were never books published in the NASA History series covering either Surveyor or Lunar Orbiter - serious omissions in my mind.
Quote from: Blackstar on 03/02/2015 12:25 amQuote from: mikes on 03/01/2015 10:45 pmThere's an Apogee book on Surveyorhttp://www.cgpublishing.com/Books/Surveyor.htmlI have that. It's the reports from the missions, not a history of the program. The program history is interesting. Surveyor started out as a much more complicated science mission. I think it included both orbiter and lander. It got scaled down to primarily support Apollo by testing the lunar surface. There were later proposals for long-lived Surveyors and even a Surveyor rover, but these never got funded. There was some work done on the rover.Still, I'd recommend the Surveyor book if you're interested in the subject.The version of the Surveyor rover I've seen written up was in fact proposed as an additional attempt to support Apollo.It had little tread units instead of footpads, with electric motors swiveling the tread units for steering, and of course running the little tank-style treads for propulsion. The thing was designed to move a few cm a second, very slow and deliberate. It wasn't designed to make long traverses.The mission design I saw was for the Surveyor rover to traverse back and forth, in lawnmower-like strips, through the primary Apollo landing site, measuring slopes and locating every crater and rock in the area within millimeters. This was supposed to give the first Apollo landings detailed information about the site for landing and EVA training purposes.I believe this particular Surveyor rover concept was canned when someone in ASPO realized that the people proposing it suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder...
I had never heard of the Lunar Orbiter history before! I will have to order the paper copy from Amazon and hope it's not one of their piss-poor inhouse third rate reproductions.
There was a rover for Surveyor proposed late in the program (I think 1967 or later).
Quote from: Blackstar on 03/02/2015 04:07 pmThere was a rover for Surveyor proposed late in the program (I think 1967 or later). Did this have anything to do with Prospector which was a lunar rover program dating from the early '60s? Or was it something else entirely?
IIRC there is a good discussion of the Surveyor rover (and a comparison with rocker-bogie rovers) in "Sojourner" by Andrew Mishkin