LROC: America's last unmanned lunar lander

Surveyor 7, on the ejecta blanket of Tycho, the last
of the Surveyor spacecraft (1967-1968), and the only one of the series to land in the lunar
highlands. LROC Narrow Angle Camera NAC frame M175355093L, LRO orbit 10976, November 8, 2011; field of view is 500 meters across, viewed at the original scaled 43 cm per pixel resolution at an illumination incidence angle of 56.22° Inset, from the LROC Featured Image released September 7, 2012, is enlarged 4x
[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Ryan Clegg
LROC News System

Surveyor 7 landed in the lunar highlands (40.980°S, 348.486°E) on 10 January 1968, on an impact-melt coated ejecta blanket 46.6 km (29 miles) north of the rim of Tycho Crater. The last spacecraft of the Surveyor series, it was sent to an area far from the mare in the southern highlands, in order to sample and analyze materials different from those of the other Surveyor missions. Surveyor 7 was the only Surveyor spacecraft to be sent to a region solely for scientific interest, rather than to obtain more data for the upcoming Apollo program, since program managers had decided that the previous Surveyor missions had already provided sufficient data to enable ...