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courtesy
U.
S. N. O. | |
The
phase of the Moon right now
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Exploring the Moon
The
first robot explorers
Until
the dawn of the Space Age, no one had seen the farside of the Moon
– indeed, the averted hemisphere was popularly referred to as
the
“dark side”, even though it undergoes the same
monthly
cycle of day and night as the Earth-facing side. Most astronomers had
expected it would be broadly similar to the near side, albeit more
heavily cratered, but the reality turned out to be somewhat different.
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| The far
side of the Moon, from Luna 3 |
Luna
3,
launched by the former Soviet Union, gave us our first views of this
unseen hemisphere when it looped behind the Moon in October
1959.
By chance, the release of Luna 3’s first images coincided
with a
live screening of The
Sky at Night
on BBC TV. Patrick Moore recalled the moment: “The
photographs
came through exactly one minute before transmission was due
to
begin, which did not give me much time to think out a suitable
commentary. Luckily the Mare Crisium was shown so clearly that I was
able to recognise it at once, which enabled me to get my
bearings.”
Although crude by
today’s standards, the
pictures
were good enough to demonstrate the almost total lack of dark lowland
mare areas on the farside. The reason for this asymmetry between the
two sides of the Moon is still not fully understood, but it seems that
most of the dark lavas that flowed out to produce the maria formed
under the Earth-facing half.
The United States,
spurred by President
John F. Kennedy’s challenge
laid down in May 1961 to land a man on the Moon and return him to Earth
by the end of the 1960s, was also attempting to send probes to the Moon
to ascertain what awaited the lunarnauts. The first fully successful US
lunar probes were Ranger
7 in July 1964, followed by Ranger
8 and Ranger
9
in February and March 1965, which took a rapid series of close-up
photographs as they plunged towards the Moon, being destroyed on
impact. The Ranger photographs revealed that even what appeared from
Earth to be the smoothest parts of the surface were actually peppered
with tiny impact craters and boulders, potentially hazardous to a
landing.
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 |  |  | | | Sequence
from Ranger 7 as it plunged towards the Moon |
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