Editing Ranger 3 (section)

===Mission failure, propellant exhaustion, and cancellation===
The TV camera did transmit images, but since the antenna was now pointed away from Earth, the received images were extremely weak and noisy. It was possible to see the reference crosses on the camera lens, illuminated by reflected sunlight from the probe's chassis, but the Moon was not visible.

With the computer dead, Ranger&nbsp;3 became completely unresponsive to any ground commands and the Earth and Sun sensors were rendered useless. The gyroscopes continued to maneuver the probe and ground controllers momentarily reacquired a lock on the antenna, but without stable attitude control, they could not hold it steady. As they were unaware of the computer failure, they continued sending commands to Ranger&nbsp;3 in vain. Sporadic tracking of the probe continued until January&nbsp;31 when the attitude control thrusters exhausted their propellant supply, at which point the mission was officially terminated.<ref name="nssdc1962-001A"/>