See here:

http://www.universetoday.com/2008/11/14/moon-impact-probe-hits-paydirt-or-pay-regolith%e2%80%a6/

Rangers 3, 4, and 5 carried seismometers encased in a sphere of
balsa wood designed to survive impact and report back on any lunar
quakes for as long as their batteries lasted. There is a great pre-mission
issue of National Geographic Magazine from 1962 that explains the
flight profile complete with nice artwork of how things should have gone.

Whether this would have been a success or not we will never know
(unless someone retries the mission in the future - hint hint): Ranger 3
missed the Moon (and the few images it tried to take only got black
space). Ranger 4 did hit the lunar farside (the first for the US), but
its electronics went screwy and no data was returned. Ranger 5 also
went screwy and returned no data.

The sterilization process designed to keep Earth microbes from infecting
the Moon was blamed on their failures. After this NASA decided to go
with Rangers that just slammed into the Moon and returned thousands
of photos before impact. Ranger 6 failed due to an electric arc, but
the rest of the series 7-9 succeeded.

And a good thing too, because it was quite clear that had Ranger 7
also failed, the series would have likely been written off after 6 failures.

What a glorious week it has been for space science!