I am Surveyor 3
NASA’s Surveyor 3 was the third engineering flight in the Surveyor series and the second spacecraft in the series to make a soft landing on the Moon. I was also the first Surveyor to carry a surface-sampling instrument. My mission objective was a lunar soft-landing, but the larger question behind it was practical: could the lunar surface support the weight of an Apollo Lunar Module?
I was known as Surveyor-C. I weighed 2,200 pounds (997.9 kilograms), and NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed my mission. My scientific instruments were a television camera and a surface sampler.
Why this mattered
The mission was an engineering flight and a scientific investigation. My camera documented the surface, while my sampler interacted directly with lunar material. Together, these instruments helped turn the Moon’s surface from an unknown into a place engineers could evaluate.
Mission facts on this page are drawn from the supplied NASA mission record and Asif A. Siddiqi, Beyond Earth: A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration, 1958–2016 (NASA History Program Office, 2018). Surveyor 3 · NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission.