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Old 03-03-2019, 02:23 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
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Thank you, Ez2cDave, for those Juno II photographs and paper model plans! The Pioneer 3 and 4 Juno II rounds, ironically, had rather plain (mostly white, with red lettering) paint schemes. The Explorer, Explorer S, and Beacon Explorer rounds (the "S series" and Beacon Explorer satellite launches failed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_II ) had more photogenic white with black checkerboard paint schemes (I'm glad that the paper model files contain both). Here (see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=61A6cpSXsnA ), for "historical completeness," are multiple views of the spectacular July 16, 1959 Juno II Explorer S-1 launch failure at LC-5 (ten years to the day before the launch of Apollo 11!). Also:

Your pictures raise another question, which at this late date may no longer be answerable: Which of the several Redstone/Jupiter steel launch tables (which are at the KSC "Rocket Garden," the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station museum at LC-5/6 and LC-26A & B, the Alabama Space and Rocket Center, and the U.S. Army's Redstone Arsenal musem)--if any of them--were the actual ones that were used to launch Explorer 1, Mercury-Redstone 3 & 4, and Pioneer 3 and 4? (I contacted all of these places last year, but no one knew.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by luke strawwalker
Amazing they could get that close to the Moon with that combination... basically the upper stages were "unguided" (spin stabilized) and once the first stage engine shut down and the thing staged, it was basically going wherever it was pointed (Newton was firmly in the driver's seat).

Talk about "shooting from the hip"!!! No midcourse-corrections, and basically "bullet guidance" on the second and third stages... crazy!

Later! OL J R
JPL, ABMA, von Braun & Co. weren't quite *that* crazy. They had no mid-course correction capability on the U.S. Army Pioneer 3 and 4 (even the USAF's Pioneer 0, 1, and 2 had that capability, possessing small velocity-correction solid motors as well as a Falcon missile motor as a retro-rocket, for lunar orbit insertion), but as with the Jupiter-C/Juno I, the Juno II had a gas jet-stabilized control section that housed the upper "spinning washtub" stages, and aimed them before firing them (see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j9JfMj1rkk ). Also, here www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yOdcaTGqFA&t=113s is a short NASA film on the Pioneer 4 mission, which shows what a shoe-string--yet successful--tracking and data acquisition operation they had (it was hard to do in 1959, with only *one* deep space station, at Goldstone!). Plus:

Pioneer 3 was to carry a radiation instrumentation payload past the Moon (but it fell short, rising only 63,000 miles--still a great distance in 1958!). Pioneer 4 was to carry a spin-scan TV system to image the lunar farside, but the project scientists wanted to fly another radiation instrumentation payload on Pioneer 4 instead, and their preference won out. (Also, I suspect that the Juno II team had doubts about whether it could be aimed well enough to inject Pioneer 4 into a "Figure 8" orbit passing around the far side of the Moon and then back close to the Earth, especially after Pioneer 3's [and Pioneer 1's] "tiny-but-sufficient" velocity and aiming errors. Even Pioneer 4 was about 95 mph slower than planned, which--combined with a too-high climb angle--resulted in a more distant [~37,300 miles] lunar flyby than they wanted.) Pioneer 4 was originally supposed to have carried an automatic darkroom film camera/spot-of-light image scanner (as the later NASA Lunar Orbiter spacecraft did), but the Soviets' Luna 1, which was launched on January 2, 1959 and missed hitting the Moon, reported enough radiation that the amount of shielding that the film would have required would have made Pioneer 4 too heavy (over the Juno II's ~13-pound "lunar payload limit") for the vehicle to boost it to the Moon. As well:

Both Pioneer 3 and 4 did carry a dual-photocell, camera-triggering optical switch as an engineering test, however (for triggering cameras on future probes), although neither probe got close enough to the Moon--whose light was to shine on both, differently-angled photocells simultaneously--to trigger the optical switch. I wish NASA had tried a couple more times (they had at least one spare Pioneer 3/4-type lunar probe, and several Juno II launch vehicles), as they likely would have succeeded in getting clear TV pictures of the far side of the Moon in the spring or summer of 1959, before the Soviet Union's Luna 3 did that--getting admittedly poor-quality photographs of the lunar farside--in October of that year.
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