A brief survey of NASA's space imaging technology

Visitors to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, will soon have a chance to see those items Neil Armstrong kept from the Apollo 11 moon landing. This week's news about Armstrong's memorabilia got us thinking: What are some the other notable bits of tech NASA used to document space exploration? Well, the full list is a bit daunting, as the agency has been hard at work for decades. However, we've compiled a collection of the highlights, from the first US spacecraft to transmit close-up photographs of the moon's surface to X-ray telescopes used to capture cosmic explosions. We even tossed in a selfie for good measure.

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1964: Ranger 7

As you can probably imagine, space exploration in the late '50s and early '60s was wrought with failure. The Ranger lunar mission actually began in 1959, but after a lot of trial and error, Ranger 7 captured the first image of the moon by a spacecraft from the United States five years later. The seventh lunar lander actually snapped around 4,300 high-resolution images with its six cameras and transmitted them all back to Earth before crashing on the moon's surface. Of course, this data helped guide future missions, including the Apollo 11's historic landing.