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Object

Luna 3

A crescent moon with a dark central shadow, resembling a ring, is shown against a black background, representing the first photographs of the Moon's far side taken by the Luna 3 probe.

Soviet probe launched in October 1959 that returned the first photographs of the Moon's far side. To reach a vantage point above the lunar south pole and back, mission planners used a lunar gravity assist — the first ever flown — to bend its trajectory into a wide loop that returned the spacecraft to Earth range for film readout. The images were grainy, but they showed a hemisphere no human had ever seen.

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