Luna programme became the first probe to achieve a soft landing on another planetary body. It returned five black and white stereoscopic circular panoramas, which were the first close-up shots of the Lunar surface. "Luna 10" (March 1966) became the first artificial satellite of the Moon. "Luna 17" (November 1970) and "Luna 21" (January 1973) carried the Lunokhod vehicles, which roamed around on the Moon's terrain. Another major achievement of the Luna programme, with "Luna 16" (September 1970), "Luna 20" (February 1972) and "Luna 24" (August 1976), was the ability to collect samples of lunar soil and return them to Earth. The
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