Luna 1 but it was a second or two before we realised what we had". The picture shows the lights of Edinburgh in the foreground. The rocket is seen as an illuminated cloud top centre." "Luna 1" was meant to crash on the Moon; however, due to a malfunction of the ground control system, the probe missed its target by 5,995 kilometers. Despite this, "Luna 1" still managed to collect vital information to assist in the understanding of the universe. Its goal to crash on the Moon was subsequently achieved by Luna 2 on September 13, 1959. Luna 1 Luna 1, also
Luna 15 in Mare Crisium. An audio recording of the minutes in which British technicians at the radio telescope facility in Jodrell Bank observed Luna 15's descent was first made available to the public on 3 July 2009. In a race to reach the Moon and return to Earth, the parallel missions of Luna 15 and Apollo 11 represented, in many ways, the culmination of the Space Race between the space programs of both the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s. The simultaneous missions became one of the first instances of Soviet–American space cooperation: the Soviet Union released Luna