History of mapping the Moon

For most of history, maps of the Moon were based only on the near side, because that’s all we could see from Earth. Danny Robb of Inverting Vision gives a visual history lesson on how we eventually saw the rest.

We wouldn’t be able to get a better look at the far side of the Moon until we invented a way to send cameras there. At the dawn of the Space Age, rockets gave us the ability to do just that. In 1959, Soviet engineers created a series of robotic probes, and launched them toward the Moon. One of these managed a lunar flyby, and was named Luna 3. Engineers equipped Luna 3 with a film camera, capable of developing the exposed film, scanning the images, and transmitting them back to Earth by radio.