Moon landing

A Moon landing or lunar landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. This includes both crewed and robotic missions. The first human-made object to touch the Moon was Luna 2, on 13 September 1959.

This article is about lunar landings. For the Cold War "Race to the Moon", see Space Race. For the first crewed Moon landing, see Apollo 11.

Clickable map of the locations of all successful soft landings on the near side of the Moon to date (top).

  •   Luna programme (USSR)
  •   Chang'e program (China)
  •   Chandrayaan program (India)
  •   Surveyor program (US)
  •   Apollo program (US)
  •   SLIM (Japan)
Dates are landing dates in Coordinated Universal Time. Except for the Apollo program, all soft landings were uncrewed.

Apollo 11 was the first crewed mission to land on the Moon, on 20 July 1969. There were six crewed landings between 1969 and 1972, and numerous uncrewed landings, with no soft landings happening between 22 August 1976 and 14 December 2013. All crewed missions to the Moon were conducted by the Apollo program, with the last departing the lunar surface in December 1972. All soft landings took place on the near side of the Moon until 3 January 2019, when Chang'e 4 made the first landing on the far side of the Moon.

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