The first human device to reach the surface of the Moon was the Luna 2 probe of the Soviet Union, which was launched 64 years ago on September 12 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
This probe, which weighs 390 kilograms and has a diameter of 0.9 meters, was launched in 1959 aboard a Vostok rocket, destined to crash on the Moon, successfully doing so on September 14 east of Mare Imbrium, near in the craters of Aristides and Archimedes.
This was the first successful lunar mission. Luna 2 has a similar design to Luna 1 – which reached around the Moon -, a spherical probe with antennas and parts of the instruments protruding.
The instrumentation is also the same, including scintillation counters, Geiger counters, magnetometers, Cherenkov detectors, and micrometeorite detectors. It has no propulsion system.
In the final part of its journey, when Luna 2 separated from the upper part of its rocket, it began to transmit information to Earth using three different transmitters, allowing its impact on the surface can be verified.
To get a visual representation of the ship from Earth during the transit, on September 13, a cloud of steam was released that expanded up to 650 kilometers in diameter, and it was visible to many observatories. This vapor cloud acts as an experiment to see how sodium gas behaves in a vacuum and zero gravity.
The last stage of the Vostok rocket, which accompanied the ship to the Moon, did not carry any kind of tracking device, so it is not known where it ended up, although it is estimated that it did about 30 minutes after the ship. ..
