Lunar craters Lunar craters Lunar craters are impact craters on Earth's Moon. The Moon's surface has many craters, almost all of which were formed by impacts. The word "crater" was adopted from the Greek word for vessel - (Κρατήρ a Greek vessel used to mix wine and water). Galileo built his first telescope in late 1609, and turned it to the Moon for the first time on November 30, 1609. He discovered that, contrary to general opinion at that time, the Moon was not a perfect sphere, but had both mountains and cup-like depressions. These were named craters by Schroeter (1791), extending
First on the Moon that in this case, Soviet cosmonauts were first. The movie follows the selection and training of a small group of cosmonauts. The one who shines above the others (similar to the clear front-runners in the early historical Soviet space program) is Captain Ivan Sergeyevich Kharlamov (possibly a reference to the real-life cosmonaut Valentin Varlamov). He is helped into a space suit and loaded into the capsule, and the rocket lifts off for the Moon—but contact with it is soon lost. Most of the remainder of the film seems to follow the search for information about what happened next, as the