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In lunar orbit, the astronauts also pointed a 70-mm. Hasselblad camera straight down at the lunar surface and shot strips of overlapping still pictures that NASA technicians will use for stereo pictures of the landscape. With these, they will be able to determine the height of crater walls, boulders and ridges with great accuracy. Other pictures, shot when the sun was between 3 and 7 degrees above the horizon, brought out surface features undiscernible in unmanned Lunar Orbiter pictures, most of which were taken with the sun much higher in the sky. Although the spacecraft window and variations in film and in the reproduction of transparencies produced a yellowish tinge in some lunar photographs, blue and green in others, NASA scientists stress that the moon's true color is actually what the astronauts described: grey.
"An Amazing Series." After initial examination of the Apollo still pictures, NASA Geologist John Dietrich noted that the rills clearly visible on the lunar surface are similar to arroyos in the Western U.S. He suggested that they are "tension features caused by contraction of the delicate surface material." But the NASA scientist was most enthusiastic about a series of unscheduled lunar pictures shot by Astronaut Anders on the way back from the moon.
After Apollo 8's tenth revolution, when the Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine had fired to send the spacecraft back toward earth, Anders glanced out of the window and found himself looking at a view of the nearly full moon never before seen by man. From his vantage point above the eastern edge (as viewed from earth) of the moon, he could see both the front and hidden backside of the lunar surface. Unlimbering his Hasselblad, he used the remainder of his unexposed color film to shoot what Dietrich calls "an amazing series of moon pictures."
To the north, on the backside, these shots show a big, bright crater, previously unseen. Its presence had long been suggested to earthbound astronomers by whitish rays of material that extend from its rim over the lunar north pole and down onto the visible side. The Apollo photographs provided the first conclusive evidence that the crater did exist. The same series also revealed that two craters previously spotted by Lunar Orbiters were also heavily rayed, a feature that was not apparent in Orbiter photographs.
Even more information may eventually be gained from the Apollo 8 pictures. Two rolls of black-and-white film, one of them containing overhead shots of a proposed lunar-module landing site, were poorly exposed. NASA has high hopes that details can be brought out by photographic experts who were hurriedly called to Houston last week, and that the reconstituted pictures can soon be released and shown.
New Platform. While excitement about the historic flight of Apollo 8 was still simmering, a door in Cape Kennedy's mammoth assembly building slid open. From inside, a 363-ft.-tall Saturn 5 slowly emerged, standing upright on a crawler-transporter as large as half a football field. Seven hours later, the giant rocket completed its 31-mile trip to launch pad 39B. Atop Saturn was the Apollo 9 spacecraft, which is scheduled to be launched into earth orbit on Feb. 28 for the first manned test flight of the lunar module (LM).