Luna 9 was launched on January 31, 1966 at 1141 AM UTC from Site 31 at Baikonur Cosmodrome. It was the culmination of six years of development spearheaded by Sergey Korolev, the Soviet Chief Designer, to make a soft landing on the moon with a probe. Korolev had convinced officials to give the project the Go Head in 1959 in which the Soviet Union saw the successes of Luna 2, the first to impact the moon, and Luna 3, which took photos of the far side of the moon. However, at that point, the R7 rocket variant currently in service could not deliver enough mass to the moon for a soft landing, such a mission required 1.5 tons to be delivered on a Transluner trajectory. That problem was solved by 1963 with the development of the Monia rocket, which featured highly efficient kerosene oxygen upper stages analogous to the hydrogen oxygen Centaur stage that the United States had been developing for the surveyor program. And attempts to launch lunar landers began in that year. Unfortunately, the rocket had six launch failures when carrying lunar landers from 1963 to 1965, and when combined with five failures of the spacecraft meant a string of 11 failures for the E6 series of probes of which Luna 9 was a part. Three of the failed spacecraft impacted on the moon and two flew past the moon, so those five received Luna designations 4 through 8. Luna 9 was actually the 13th E6 type assembled, the first one was not launched. Luna 9 was a testament to persistence, and it was the first success of the lunar program since 1959's Luna 3. The only successful Soviet lunar mission from 1960 to 1965 was Zond 3, which flew by the moon in July of 1965, so it was a long hard slog indeed. Tragically, Sergei Korolev died on January 14, a mere two and a half weeks before the launch of Luna 9, and three weeks before its long-awaited success. His name had been revealed to the public and the world in Probe that for the first time on January 16, and there was a state funeral to honor him. Those working on the Luna 9 project petitioned to have the success dedicated to his memory, but instead the government decided that the funeral had been enough and dedicated the mission to all those who had worked on it. Luna 9 used an ingenious method to land its 99kg scientific payload on the moon, to scent began with a high thrust main engine, supplemented by four vernier thrusters for steering. As the main engine ignited, two side modules contained the Geins radar and other heavy equipment that was no longer needed were jettisoned. The main engine was shut down, at 250 meters from the surface, and the vernier is continued to control the craft, but they didn't really have enough thrust to slow it to a halt, but rather just mitigate its acceleration toward the ground. Ground sensor wires detected when the craft was five meters from the surface, less than a second before impact, and shut down the verniers while ejecting the capsule safely away from the lander stage. Airbags around the capsule were inflated to cushion its impact, once the probe detected that had settled down, the airbags deflated, and the egg-shaped probe opened self-writing petals and began taking in the scenery. Luna 9 transmitted panoramas of its landing location in the ocean of storms back to Earth, a similar landing method would be used on Mars probes in the future. The success confirmed that it was possible to land safely on the moon and alleviated some concerns about the possibility of sinking in the fine dust on the surface, paving the way for the entire lunar project that followed. With that, thank you for watching the submission profile of Luna 9.