October 7, 1959

Luna 3

Luna 3 takes the first photographs of the Moon's far side

The camera carried its own darkroom. For eleven days after the pictures were taken, the only images of the Moon's far side were still aboard the spacecraft.

03:30 UT, 7 October 1959

Having passed around the Moon, the Soviet probe Luna 3 looked back at the sunlit far side and began photographing it at 03:30 UT on 7 October 1959, the first exposure taken from about 63,500 km away.

Over roughly 40 minutes it exposed 29 photographs covering about 70 percent of the far side.

The far side is not permanently dark. Luna 3 photographed it specifically while the Sun was on it.

A darkroom aboard the probe

The Yenisey photo-television unit used paired 200 mm and 500 mm lenses. Film was exposed, chemically developed aboard the spacecraft, then scanned into electrical signals for facsimile transmission by radio.

The exposures revealed that the far side has far fewer dark maria than the familiar Earth-facing hemisphere.

Sent back on the 18th, not the 7th

No usable images were returned on 7 October. Seventeen photographs were transmitted to Earth on 18 October, as the spacecraft approached Earth again.

The poor images led observers to identify Mare Desiderii, an interpretation no longer recognized as a single real feature. The USSR Academy of Sciences used the images for the first far-side atlas, which catalogued 498 formations.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The listed date and wording conflate two stages of the mission. October 7 is securely documented as the date the photographs were taken; successful transmission to Earth occurred on October 18.
Older mission accounts disagree about Luna 3's eventual fate. A 2020 peer-reviewed orbital reconstruction concludes that it collided with Earth in late March 1960.