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Moon landing

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This map shows the landing sites of the Surveyor, Apollo and Luna missions

A Moon landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. It is a follow up to Project Mercury. This includes both crewed and uncrewed (robotic) missions. The first man-made object to reach the surface of the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2 mission, on 13 September 1959.[1]

The United States' Apollo 11 was the first crewed mission to land on the Moon, on 20 July 1969.[2] There have been six missions with people onboard that landed on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. There were also numerous landings without people onboard, with no soft landings happening from 22 August 1976 until 14 December 2013.

To date, the United States is the only country to have successfully landed humans on the Moon. The last mission was in December, 1972, and the last human to walk on the Moon was Gene Cernan.

References

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  1. "Luna 2". NASA–NSSDC.
  2. NASA Apollo 11 40th anniversary.