page_title: Far side of the Moon
section_title: Soft landing
hierarchical_section_title: Far side of the Moon / Exploration / Soft landing
caption_attribution_description: Panorama of the landing site of Chang'e 4 on the far side of the Moon
context_page_description: The far side of the Moon is the hemisphere of the Moon that always faces away from Earth. The far side's terrain is rugged with a multitude of impact craters and relatively few flat lunar maria compared to the near side. It has one of the largest craters in the Solar System, the South Pole–Aitken basin. Both sides of the Moon experience two weeks of sunlight followed by two weeks of night; even so, the far side is sometimes called the "dark side of the Moon", where "dark" is used to mean unseen rather than lacking sunlight.
  About 18 percent of the far side is occasionally visible from Earth due to libration. The remaining 82 percent remained unobserved until 1959, when it was photographed by the Soviet Luna 3 space probe. The Soviet Academy of Sciences published the first atlas of the far side in 1960. The Apollo 8 astronauts were the first humans to see the far side in person when they orbited the Moon in 1968. All manned and unmanned soft landings had taken place on the near side of the Moon, until 3 January 2019 when the Chang'e 4 spacecraft made the first landing on the far side.
context_section_description: The China National Space Administration's Chang'e 4 made the first ever soft landing on the lunar far side on 3 January 2019. The craft included a lander equipped with a low-frequency radio spectrograph and geological research tools.
caption: The first panorama from the far side of the Moon taken by Chang'e 4
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2019:02:12 21:45:08"}