Peanuts: The Traditional Space Launch Snack

Holding the current bottle of peanuts in the MSA. Teitel. Next to the Deep Space Network’s main control room at JPL is the aptly named Mission Supply Area. It's an area used for major mission events like launches, landings, and orbit insertion burns, and if you go there on a tour someone will offer you peanuts. It’s tradition, a tradition that gained a lot of popularity when the world watched engineers eating peanuts during Curiosity’s 2012 landing on Mars. There’s even a cardboard cutout of NASA’s very own mohawk guy, Bobak Ferdowsi, behind the glass-encased bottle of peanuts that was in the room that night! But the tradition is far older. It dates back to 1964 when America was desperate for a successful lunar mission. Here's the short answer. If you're keen to know more about each failed Ranger mission, read on after the video! [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELtJ7jzEBgQ[/embed] Before sending men to the Moon, NASA had to figure out what exactly it would be dealing with when it got there. Thus was born the Ranger program, the first program to study the Moon up close and in detail. Management of the program fell to JPL since this was the centre with robotic experience; Explorer 1, America’s first satellite, was a JPL success story. Technologically Ranger was a simple design. The first iteration of the spacecraft, the so-called Block I model, was a hexagonal base 5 feet (1.5 meters) across with an upper cone-shaped portion 13 feet (4 meters) tall and two solar panels measuring 17 feet (5.2 meters) across. Communicating via a high-gain directional dish antenna, the spacecraft would send back data from its Lyman-alpha telescope, rubidium-vapor magnetometer, electrostatic analyzers, medium-energy range particle detectors, triple coincidence telescopes, cosmic-ray integrating ionization chamber, cosmic dust detectors, and solar X-ray scintillation counters. Launched on an Atlas rocket with an Agent upper stage, it would basically gather a bunch of data points as it flew to the Moon before crashing pretty hard on the surface. After a month of delays owing to power outages, fuel tank valve malfunctions, and various spacecraft subsystem failures, Ranger 1 finally launched at 6:04 in the morning on August 23, 1961. Spotty telemetry told engineers that the spacecraft reached its parking orbit but the Agena failed to relaunch. Ranger 1 wouldn’t be leaving Earth orbit. On the plus side, the spacecraft worked beautifully and did return data, just not from its target body.