Ranger 7

Mission Profile

Ranger 7 was the first fully successful NASA Ranger mission, launched on 28 July 1964 aboard an Atlas LV-3 Agena-B to conduct the first close-up photography of the Moon before impact, returning 4,308 images of the lunar surface before hitting Mare Cognitum on 31 July 1964. The images resolved features as small as 25 cm — thousands of times better than the best ground-based telescope images of the time — revealing a surface covered in small craters and boulders right down to the resolution limit of the cameras. Ranger 7's success ended a streak of eight consecutive Ranger failures and provided the critical surface imagery NASA needed to confidently plan Apollo landing sites. Ranger 8 and 9 followed with similar successes, and the three missions together transformed understanding of the lunar surface and confirmed it could support spacecraft landing.