Today the first spacecraft in the history of astronomy makes a soft-landing on the Moon.
Luna 9 transmitted the first photographs from the Moon’s surface – which, in a strange twist, were released by the British before the Soviets when the Jodrell Bank Observatory intercepted their transmissions. Credit: National Space Science Data Center
On January 31, 1966, the Soviet Union launched Luna 9 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome with the plan to land on the lunar surface. Missions over the past three years had gone awry, with Luna 4 and 6 missing from the Moon entirely, and Luna 5, 7, and 8 crashing on its surface.
Three days later, at an altitude of 5,157 miles (8,300 kilometers) above the Moon’s surface, Luna 9 aligned itself for its attempt and began its descent. The retrorockets were fired at an altitude of about 47 miles (75 km), burning for 46 to 48 seconds. This reduced the spacecraft’s speed from 1.6 miles per second (2.6 km per second) to 82 feet, or about 0.015 miles per second (25 meters per second). It took about an hour to descend; As the surface approached, a shock-resistant capsule separated from the rocket and impacted the Moon in the Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms). The 220-pound (100 kg) capsule opened four “petals” to stabilize itself, and deployed its antennas, transmitting the first photographs from the Moon. This first landing proved that, rather than being covered with unstable dust, as had been theorized, the lunar surface was strong enough to support a spacecraft.
