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
Surveyor program time that NASA tested such systems in the challenging thermal and radiation environment near the Moon. Each Surveyor mission consisted of a single unmanned spacecraft designed and built by Hughes Aircraft Company. The launch vehicle was the Atlas-Centaur, which injected the craft directly into trans-lunar flightpath. The craft did not orbit the Moon on reaching it, but directly decelerated from impact trajectory, from 2.6 km/s relative to the Moon before firing retrorockets to a soft landing about 3 minutes 10 seconds later. Each craft was planned to slow to about 110 m/s (4% of speed before retrofire) by a main