Launched days earlier, Luna 3 swung around the Moon and used an automated film camera system to photograph the lunar far side, then developed the film onboard and scanned it for radio transmission back to Earth. The grainy images, revealing a landscape with far fewer dark maria than the near side, gave humanity its first glimpse of the Moon's hidden face.
Luna 3's camera system was a marvel of Cold War improvisation: since digital imaging did not exist, Soviet engineers built a miniature automated photo lab into the probe, complete with chemical processing tanks, that developed 35mm film in flight and then scanned the negatives with a cathode ray tube to convert images into a radio signal beamable back to tracking stations in the Soviet Union.
The pictures that came through on October 7 were blurry, streaked, and low-resolution by any later standard, but they showed something no human had ever seen: the far side of the Moon, forever hidden from Earth by tidal locking. Scientists were startled to find it dominated by pale highlands with only a few dark maria, a stark asymmetry with the near side that later missions would help explain through differences in crustal thickness.
Soviet scientists rushed to name features before Western astronomers could, christening a mountain range the Soviet Mountains and a dark plain the Sea of Moscow. The mission, occurring almost exactly two years after Sputnik, reinforced the sense that the Soviet Union held a commanding lead in the young space race, a perception that would only deepen with Gagarin's flight two years later.
Key people: Sergei Korolev