There's not as much contrast between that and the surrounding craters. This is how Lovell famously described the lunar surface: 'The moon is essentially gray, no color, looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand. They became the first humans in history not only to escape from low Earth orbit but also to see the elusive far side. would place a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth by the end of the 1960s, by December 1968 NASA was ready to send three people - Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders - all the way around the moon and back for the Apollo 8 mission. Following the declaration by President Kennedy that the U.S. In the meantime, NASA was progressing its Apollo Program at a phenomenal rate. Zond 3 produced 23 very detailed photographs of the lunar far side, which enabled one of the first detailed maps of the entire lunar surface to be constructed. In 1965, another Soviet mission, Zond 3, flew by the moon with a far better camera than Luna 3 possessed and with the ability to conduct more detailed science observations, including spectroscopy. The first image of the lunar far side, returned by the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 spacecraft. the resulting giant crater, termed an 'impact basin,' was subsequently filled with volcanic lava. It was almost 560 miles (900 kilometers) across, pretty much the length of the United Kingdom give or take, and was caused by an asteroid impact, thought to be around 40 miles (64 km) wide just under 4 billion years ago. The view from Luna 3 showed how vast an impact crater Orientale was, resembling a bullseye.

The subtlest hint of Mare Orientale, one of the largest impact craters known, seen on the limb of the moon, had been known of since its 'discovery' by Julius Franz in 1906 and can be seen during good librations when that portion of the moon swings around towards us. We already had an inkling of one of those vast new craters, which is actually one of the very few mare on the far side.

The Soviets started naming many of the features they were seeing for the first time, an act which caused some controversy in what was known as the height of the Cold War era. Instead, the far side was littered with craters, even more so than the near side, and some of those craters were the size of small countries. These dark patches are basaltic plains called 'mare' created by volcanic activity on the moon billions of years ago. It was almost immediately evident that the dark patches that make the face of the Man in the Moon on the near side are almost completely absent on the far side. Those six images covered 70 percent of the far side and opened a whole new perspective on the lunar surface. Although only 17 of the 29 taken were transmitted successfully back to Earth, of which six were considered good enough for publication, they proved to be a revelation. The spacecraft, using a combination of two camera systems, one wide-field and one narrow-field but higher resolution, and a crude onboard scanner, could then transmit the processed images, which were spot-scanned from the photographs, back to the receiving station in the former Soviet Union.

Ironically, the film used had been stolen from American spy balloons, as it had to be sturdy and radiation-hardened. Luna 3 took 29 film images of the far side in total, which were photographically developed, fixed and dried on board - remember, this was long before multi mega-pixel cameras. In 1959, barely two years after placing Sputnik 1 in orbit, Russian engineers managed to send the spacecraft, which was crude by today's standards, into orbit around the moon and, for the first time, we got a good look at the mysterious far side. Our first glimpse of the mysterious far side came early in the space race, courtesy of the Soviet Union's Luna 3 spacecraft almost 60 years ago. Charlie Duke became the youngest person to walk on the moon during the Apollo 16 mission.

Sun moon secrets