which country put the first man on the moon

Others were for scientific purposes, such as when NASA slammed parts of large Saturn rockets into the lunar surface during the era of the Apollo missions in the late 1960s and 1970s, to study how seismic energy from the impacts rippled through the Moon.īut never before has a piece of long-standing space junk - the booster will have been careering around space for more than seven years - collided with the Moon. Some have involved planned landings on the Moon, successful or otherwise. Many artificial lunar impacts have been intentional crashes to bring an end to lunar-orbiting missions that have run out of fuel. The most recent was China’s Chang’e 5 lander (a different spacecraft from Chang’e 5-T1), which dropped an ascent vehicle onto the Moon in 2020 as it flew lunar samples back to Earth. The first was the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 in 1959, which became the first human-made object to make contact with another celestial body when it crashed a little north of the lunar equator. Plenty of other spacecraft - and spacecraft bits - have hit the Moon (see ‘Moon crashes’). “Public opinion has changed sufficiently in recent years that even a scientific lunar orbiter being deliberately crashed would still raise questions about impacts on the lunar environment, in a way it once wouldn’t have,” says Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. The incident poses no immediate danger to humans or other spacecraft, but with at least half a dozen craft slated to reach the Moon this year, concern is growing about the lunar surface becoming an unintentional dumping ground.

The smash-up is expected to produce a puff of debris and leave behind a small crater. Lunar gravity is now drawing it close, and will soon pull it into a fatal collision with the far side of the Moon. Although Chang’e 5-T1 returned to Earth successfully, the booster is thought to have been zipping around chaotically in space ever since. The booster is probably part of a rocket that launched a small Chinese spacecraft, called Chang’e 5-T1, towards the Moon in 2014. Will increasing traffic to the Moon contaminate its precious ice?

Which country put the first man on the moon