THE CAMERA SYSTEMS Developed for lunar and planetary work
involved a marriage of photographic and radiotelemetry
techniques. By the time it was possible to put cameras into
space near the Moon and planets, pictures could be transmitted
by radio with very little degradation from the transmission
process. To date, all pictures taken by unmanned spacecraft of
the Moon and Mars have been returned to Earth by radio-
propagation techniques. Although man had studied the Moon for
centuries, no one had ever seen its far side until this decade.
It was natural that one of the first things that occurred to man
for use of the camera in space was to record the far side to
compare it with the visible face. From a scientific point of
view, the unknown nature of its crater-pocked surface had also
caused considerable interest in the small-scale features, and in
determining the texture and composition of the surface. The
first Russian photographs of the Moon obtained with Luna III in
October 1959 were crude pictures of a portion