What Happened in History: Browse Historical Facts on Kudos 365

The Soviet Union's Luna 9 (Lunik 9) makes the first soft landing on the moon and transmits photographic data from the Moon's surface to Earth. It was the first spacecraft to achieve a soft lunar landing, preceding the U.S. Surveyor 1 soft lander by about 4 months. The probe also proved that the lunar surface could support the weight of a lander and that an object would not sink into a loose layer of dust as some models predicted. Luna 9 launched on 31 January 1966 at 11:41 UT (14:41 Moscow time) from Baikonur Cosmodrome and reached the Moon on 3 February. More