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After the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin pioneered human Earth-orbital flight in April 1961, U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy established the national objective of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely by the end of the decade. Apollo was the result of that effort.
Within a few years the Soviet Union and the United States were heavily engaged in a political and technological race to launch crewed flights to the Moon. At the time, the Soviets did not publicly acknowledge the full extent of their program, but they did launch a number of human-precursor circumlunar missions between 1968 and 1970 under the generic name Zond, using spacecraft derived from their piloted Soyuz design. Some of the Zond flights brought back color photographs of the Moon’s far side and safely carried live tortoises and other organisms around the Moon and back to Earth. In parallel with these developments, Soviet scientists began launching a series of robotic Luna spacecraft designed to go into lunar orbit and then land with heavy payloads. This series, continuing to 1976, eventually returned drill-core samples of regolith to Earth and also landed two wheeled rovers, Lunokhod 1 and 2 (1970 and 1973), that pioneered robotic mobile exploration of the Moon.
In December 1968, acting partly out of concern that the Soviet Union might be first in getting people to the Moon’s vicinity, the United States employed the Apollo 8 mission to take three astronauts—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—into lunar orbit. After circling the Moon three times, the crew returned home safely with hundreds of photographs. The Apollo 9 and 10 missions completed the remaining tests of the systems needed for landing on and ascending from the Moon. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited above them. Five more successful crewed landing missions followed, ending with Apollo 17 in 1972; at the completion of the program, a total of 12 astronauts had set foot on the Moon.
Twenty years later the Soviet Union admitted that it had indeed been aiming at the same goal as Apollo, not only with a set of spacecraft modules for landing on and returning from the Moon but also with the development of a huge launch vehicle, called the N1, comparable to the Apollo program’s Saturn V. After several launch failures of the N1, the program was canceled in 1974.
Return to the Moon
After the Apollo missions, lunar scientists continued to conduct multispectral remote-sensing observations from Earth and perfected instrumental and data-analysis techniques. During Galileo’s flybys of Earth and the Moon in December 1990 and 1992 en route to Jupiter, the spacecraft demonstrated the potential for spaceborne multispectral observations—i.e., imaging the Moon in several discrete wavelength ranges—to gather geochemical data. As a next logical step, scientists generally agreed on a global survey of physical and geochemical properties by an automated spacecraft in polar orbit above the Moon and employing techniques evolved from those used during the Apollo missions. Finally, after a long hiatus, orbital mapping of the Moon resumed with the flights of the Clementine and Lunar Prospector spacecraft, launched in 1994 and 1998, respectively.
In the first decade of the 21st century, interest in exploring the Moon was revived among the major spacefaring countries. The United States had an ambitious exploration program, with three uncrewed satellites—the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched in 2009), the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (launched in 2011), and the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (launched in 2013).
Exploration of the Moon was a key part of an Asian space race in which probes to the Moon were launched by Japan (Kaguya, launched in 2007), China (Chang’e 1, launched in 2007), and India (Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008). Chang’e 1 and Chandrayaan-1 were each their respective country’s first satellite to leave Earth orbit. All three of these probes orbited the Moon. Chang’e 2 (launched in 2010) also orbited the Moon and after eight months left orbit for the second Lagrangian point (L2) and a flyby of the asteroid Toutatis. Chang’e 3 launched in 2013 and landed on the Moon, the first such landing since Luna 24 in 1976. It carried a robotic rover, Yutu, which operated for almost three years.
Chang’e 4 lifted off on December 8, 2018. Like Chang’e 3, it carried a rover, Yutu-2. On January 3, 2019, Chang’e 4 became the first spacecraft to land on the Moon’s far side, which faces away from Earth. It landed in the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole–Aitken basin. Because Chang’e 4 was on the far side, it communicated with Earth through the Queqiao relay satellite, which had been launched in May 2018 and placed into orbit around L2.
India’s next lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2 (launched in 2019), carried a lander and rover that crashed during landing and were destroyed. However, Chandrayaan-3 (launched in 2023) became the first spacecraft to land in the Moon’s south polar region. Chang’e 5 (launched in 2020) returned about 1.7 kg (3.7 pounds) of material to Earth. Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) probe was launched in September 2023 and landed on the Moon in January 2024, making Japan the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the Moon after the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and India.
An American probe, Odysseus, landed in the south polar region of the Moon in February 2024. Odysseus was built and operated by the private company Intuitive Machines and was the first American craft to land on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Future lunar missions include a planned return of American astronauts to the Moon as part of the Artemis project, beginning with the Artemis II flight around the Moon in 2025 and the crewed landing of Artemis III in 2026. As part of Artemis, NASA plans to build a space station, Gateway, in orbit around the Moon. China is planning a robotic research station at the South Pole in the 2020s.
Mission results
The Apollo program revolutionized human understanding of the Moon. The samples collected and the human and instrumental observations have continued to be studied into the 21st century. Analyses of samples from the Luna missions have continued as well and are valuable because they were collected from eastern equatorial areas far from the Apollo sites.
One new and fundamental result has come from radiometric age dating of the samples. When a rock cools from the molten to the solid state, its radioactive isotopes are immobilized in mineral crystal lattices and then decay in place. Knowing the rate of decay of one nuclear species (nuclide) into another, scientists can, in principle, use the ratios of decay products as a clock to measure the time elapsed since the rock cooled. Some nuclides, such as isotopes of rubidium and strontium, can be used to date rocks that are billions of years old (see rubidium-strontium dating). The required measurements are threatened by contamination and other problems, such as past events that might have reset the clock. Nevertheless, with great care in sample preparation and mass spectrometry techniques, the isotopic ratios can be found and converted into age estimates. By the time of the Apollo sample returns, scientists had refined this art, and, using meteorite samples, they were already investigating the early history of the solar system.
Analysis of the first lunar samples confirmed that the Moon is an evolved body with a long history of differentiation and volcanic activity. Unlike the crust of Earth, however, the lunar crust is not recycled by tectonic processes, so it has preserved the records of ancient events. Highland rock samples returned by the later Apollo missions are nearly four billion years old, revealing that the Moon’s crust was already solid soon after the planets condensed out of the solar nebula. The mare basalts, though they cover a wide range of ages, generally show that the basin-filling volcanic outpourings occurred long after the formation of the highlands; this is the reason they are believed to have originated from later radioactive heating within the Moon rather than during the primordial heating event. Trace-element analyses indicate that the magmatic processes of partial melting gave rise to different lavas.
In addition to collecting samples, Apollo astronauts made geologic observations, took photographs, and placed long-lived instrument arrays and retroreflectors on the lunar surface. Not only the landing expeditions but also the Apollo orbital observations yielded important new knowledge. On each mission the Moon-orbiting Command and Service modules carried cameras and remote-sensing instruments for gathering compositional information.
The Clementine and Lunar Prospector spacecraft, operating in lunar polar orbits, used complementary suites of remote-sensing instruments to map the entire Moon, measuring its surface composition, geomorphology, topography, and gravitational and magnetic anomalies. The topographic data highlighted the huge South Pole–Aitken Basin, which, like the other basins on the far side, is devoid of lava filling. Measuring roughly 2,500 km (1,550 miles) in diameter and 13 km (8 miles) deep, it is the largest impact feature on the Moon and the largest known in the solar system; because of its location, its existence was not confirmed until the Lunar Orbiter missions in the 1960s. The gravity data collected by the spacecraft, combined with topography, confirmed the existence of a thick, rigid crust, giving yet more evidence that the Moon’s heat source has expired. Both spacecraft missions hinted at the long-considered possibility that water ice exists in permanently shadowed polar craters. The most persuasive evidence came from the neutron spectrometer of Lunar Prospector (see below Lunar resources).
In 2009 the Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 used its spectrometer to find water molecules on the Moon. The water molecules are mixed in with the lunar soil in small quantities; one ton of surface material contains about 1 kg (2 pounds) of water. The strongest signals of water came from the lunar poles. However, water was also detected over much of the lunar surface. Observations by the U.S. EPOXI spacecraft seemed to show that water was formed by hydrogen ions in the solar wind interacting with oxygen atoms in the lunar soil. Also in 2009, the U.S. LCROSS spacecraft crashed a Centaur rocket stage into the permanently shadowed floor of Cabeus, a crater near the Moon’s south pole. Analysis of the plume of material thrown up by the Centaur impact showed that the lunar soil at the bottom of Cabeus was 5.6 percent water ice.