Steps to the Moon

The first obvious place to send a space probe was the Moon. It’s only 238,855 miles (384,400 km) away, so both NASA and the former Soviet Union launched unmanned lunar missions in the 1960s. Luna 3 was first to send photographs of the back side of the moon, which we cannot see with telescopes from Earth. Probes from the United States named Ranger 6, Ranger 7, and Ranger 8 took a total of 17,267 pictures before they each smashed on the Moon. These pictures confirmed that there were thousands of craters too small to be seen clearly from Earth.
After 1976, no human instruments were sent to the moon until Japan became the third country to explore our neighbor by sending a spacecraft named Hiten there. It was put in orbit around the Moon in 1992. The United States has sent two spacecraft to the Moon since then, including Clementine, which found evidence of ice in craters near the Moon’s South Pole, and Lunar Prospector. In fact, NASA has made all 1,800,000 images taken by Clementine available on the Internet as a virtual map of the entire lunar surface! The European Space Agency also sent a probe, called SMART-1, to orbit the Moon. It began taking close-up pictures in 2005.