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 2 a different vehicle, delaying the flight by three days. "Luna 2", like "Luna 1", took a direct path to the Moon, with a velocity high enough to result in a travel time of around 36 hours. "Luna 2" hit the Moon about from the centre of the visible disk on 1959 September 13 at 21:02:24 UTC. "Luna 2" was similar in design to "Luna 1", a spherical spacecraft with protruding antennas and instrumentation. The instrumentation was also similar to Luna 1, including scintillation counters, geiger counters, a magnetometer, Cherenkov detectors, and micrometeorite detectors. There were no propulsion systems on "Luna