Cold War (1953–1962) human on the moon. The first of the Lunar missions was Luna 1, which launched on January 2, 1959. Its successful mission established the first rocket engine restart within Earth orbit and the first man-made object to establish heliocentric orbit. Luna 2, which launched on September 14, 1959, established the first impact into another celestial body (the moon). Finally, Luna 3 launched on October 7, 1959 and took the first pictures of the dark side of the moon. After these three missions in 1953, the Soviets continued their exploration of the moon and its environment in 21 other Luna missions.
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