a 3W transponder channel 8 at 960.58MHz. The telecommunications equipment converted the composite video signal from the camera transmitters into an RF signal for subsequent transmission through the spacecraft high-gain antenna. Sufficient video bandwidth was provided to allow for rapid framing sequences of both narrow- and wide-angle television pictures. Mission profile The Cuban Missile Crisis had momentarily diverted attention from the failure of Ranger 5, but that mission forced a wholesale review of the entire Ranger program. Numerous theories were put forward about the cause of the failures, including poor management at JPL, overly-ambitious spacecraft designs that were unworkable and unreliable with contemporary technology, and some lesser reasons such as heat sterilization of the probes. NASA established a Ranger Board of Inquiry on October 29, 1962, headed by Albert J. Kelley, with the mission of establishing by November 30 the reasons for the continued program failures. The board's findings included the verdict that the Ranger design was "more complicated than necessary" for a lunar mission and also required a very high degree of engineering and workmanship, neither of which were being delivered. They also concluded that heat sterilization was damaging to the delicate spacecraft systems and should be abandoned at once. They also found that JPL's handling of the program was poor, the spacecraft lacked redundant systems in the event of a malfunction, NASA's deep-space tracking network crews were not trained adequately and had deficiencies in their equipment, and finally, the Atlas-Agena booster's reliability was poor, having malfunctioned on eight Air Force and NASA launches as November 1962 ended. If the Thor-Agena was also counted in, there had been a total of nine times that an Agena B stage had malfunctioned in flight. The board's recommendations included improving the management of projects, abandoning heat sterilization and testing of components designed for future planetary missions on Ranger, outsourcing assembly of the probes to a subcontractor, and excluding JPL from involvement in procurement and launching of the Atlas-Agena. Moreover, it suggested that NASA needed to improve their prelaunch testing and preparation of launch vehicles. The Block III spacecraft would be stripped down to a minimum of instrumentation with the eight scientific instruments on Rangers 3-5 removed so that more space could be devoted to redundant systems hardware. This caused some protests from the scientific community that the gamma-ray and other measurements were far more valuable than simply returning photography of the Moon.