On Sun, 17 Nov 2013 johndom@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > As chutes often fail I wonder if it would be possible to design an > impact resistant payload bay, just in case. OTOH, none of the (lunar) > Ranger impact probes made it. Bad omen? Not really -- none of the Ranger hard-landers got a chance to try. ("Impact probe" is a bit of a misnomer -- the Ranger landers had solid retros that decelerated them to fairly low velocity before impact.) Only Rangers 3-5 carried the hard-lander. Ranger 3 missed the Moon due to launcher misbehavior, and Rangers 4 and 5 had major electronics failures in the main spacecraft that prevented both the midcourse correction and the lander deployment. Rangers 6-9 carried cameras only. Ranger 10 was going to make the next hard-lander attempt, but it and its successors were canceled -- Ranger had hit so many problems and delays that by the time Ranger 9 flew, Surveyor 1 was almost ready to attempt the first controlled soft landing, so further attempts with the Ranger hard-lander seemed pointless. Henry Spencer henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) (regexpguy@xxxxxxxxx)