Luna 8 velocity sufficiently for a survivable landing, "Luna 8" plummeted to the lunar surface and crashed at 21:51:30 UT on 6 December in the west of Oceanus Procellarum. The coordinates of the crash site are . Luna 8 Luna 8 (E-6 series), also known as Lunik 8, was a lunar space probe of the Luna program. It was launched in on December 3, 1965 with the objective of achieving a soft landing on the Moon. However, its retrorocket firing occurred too late, and suffered a hard impact on the lunar surface on the Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms). The mission did
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