Far side of the Moon side visible to Earth. On October 7, 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 took the first photographs of the lunar far side, eighteen of them resolvable, covering one-third of the surface invisible from the Earth. The images were analysed, and the first atlas of the far side of the Moon was published by the USSR Academy of Sciences on November 6, 1960. It included a catalog of 500 distinguished features of the landscape. A year later, the first globe (1:13 600 000 scale ) containing lunar features invisible from the Earth was released in the USSR, based on images from
USSR-1 At about 06:00 Moscow time the envelope was filled with 3 thousand cubic meters of hydrogen, or 1/8 of the balloon's geometric capacity. At stratospheric altitudes this amount would have expanded to fill the whole envelope. Prokofiev reported status to Air Forces chief Jēkabs Alksnis around 8:00. "USSR-1" with Prokofiev, Godunov and radio operator Ernst Birnbaum on board lifted off at 8:40 Moscow Time and established radio contact with ground five minutes later. According to Prokofiev's flight log, at 9:17 am "USSR-1" passed 16,800 meter mark, beating Piccard's record; between 9:19 and 9:26 the aircraft, fully expanded, levelled in a