Moon by the Soviet Union's Luna 2, an unmanned spacecraft. The United States' NASA Apollo program achieved the only manned lunar missions to date, beginning with the first manned orbital mission by Apollo 8 in 1968, and six manned landings between 1969 and 1972, with the first being Apollo 11. These missions returned lunar rocks which have been used to develop a geological understanding of the Moon's origin, internal structure, and the Moon's later history. Since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the Moon has been visited only by unmanned spacecraft. Both the Moon's natural prominence in the earthly sky and
Manfred Memorial Moon Mission onboard the Lunar Prospector, which impacted the Moon's surface on 31 July 1999. Manfred Memorial Moon Mission Manfred Memorial Moon Mission (4M) was the first private commercial probe to fly by the Moon. It was led by LuxSpace, a child company of German OHB System, in honor of OHB Systems founder, professor Manfred Fuchs, who died in 2014, and was launched with the Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 test spacecraft on 23 October 2014. The lunar flyby took place on 28 October 2014, after which the spacecraft entered the elliptical Earth orbit and continued transmission until 11 November 2014, exceeding its designed