Lunar Orbiter 5, the last of the Lunar Orbiter series costing over 200 million dollars, was designed to take additional Apollo and Surveyor landing site photography and to take broad survey images of unphotographed parts of the Moon's far side. It was also equipped to collect selenodetic, radiation intensity, and micrometeoroid impact data and was used to evaluate the Manned Space Flight Network tracking stations and Apollo Orbit Determination Program. The spacecraft was placed in a cislunar trajectory and on 5 August 1967 was injected into an elliptical near polar lunar orbit 194.5 km x 6023 km with an inclination of 85 degrees and a period of 8 hours 30 minutes. On 7 August the perilune was lowered to 100 km and on 9 August the orbit was lowered to a 99 km x 1499 km, 3 hour 11 minute period. The photographic portion of the mission ended on 18 August.

The spacecraft acquired photographic data from August 6 to 18, 1967, and readout occurred until August 27, 1967. A total of 633 high resolution and 211 medium resolution frames at resolution down to 2 meters were acquired, bringing the cumulative photographic coverage by the 5 Lunar Orbiters to 99% of the Moon's surface. The amazingly clear image of Copernicus at the upper left is one of the greatest photos of the century.

On that note, The Lunascan Project has come a long way in the 20 years since the photos of Copernicus were taken with the project's 16" f/4.5 telescope and live GBC-400 b&w camera system in 1996.  We were looking through 200 miles of the Earth's dirty atmosphere, rather than what LO5 was seeing at 60 miles and NO atmospheric blur. Scanning today with our meager $8,000 system and at farther ranges in order to capture more FOV, we're watching live, and filming, the lunar surface from 600 miles SIMRANGE rather than close up at 60 miles, and in full color, at 30 frames a second. If we wanted to, we could put a cursor box around any feature, like Copernicus, and stack the images to acquire some great pictures to frame on the office wall. But our mission is different and scanning a wide area is our main goal.