Cavalerius

Use this little-known crater to track down a historic lunar landing site

Say ‘lunar landing’ and the crewed Apollo missions likely spring to mind, being the most iconic in lunar exploration. NASA’s famous Apollo program was a technological and engineering triumph involving not just a few dozen astronauts who flew the spacecraft to the Moon and back, but hundreds of thousands of people working behind the scenes and out of the media spotlight, designing and building the spacecraft, the Saturn V rockets that launched them and everything else needed to land people on the Moon. But the Apollo landings would never have happened without the many robotic missions that preceded them, and 54 years ago, on 3 February 1966, the Russian Luna 9 probe became the first to achieve a controlled soft landing on the Moon, sending back information and images.