2) So, this photograph was taken by the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3, which was launched a month after the Luna 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to impact on the surface of the Moon. Luna 2 followed Luna 1, the first spacecraft to escape a geosynchronous Earth orbit

3) All this is to say that in the late 50s, the Russians were killing it when it came the whole Space Race thing. BUT BACK TO LUNA 3. Luna 3 was designed to take photographs of the Moon which seems pretty simple and straightforward, right? NOPE.

4) WHY? Because to take pictures you have to be stable on three-axes. You have to take the photographs remotely. AND you have to somehow transfer those pictures back to Earth...in 1959. The way that it was done on Luna 3 was WILD, Y'ALL.

5) First off, Luna 3, the first three-axis stabilized spacecraft, had to reach the Moon to take the pictures, and it had to use a little photocell to orient towards the Moon so that now, while stabilized, it could take the pictures. Which it did. On PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM.

6) And it gets WILDER because these photos were then moved to a little CHEMICAL PLANT to DEVELOP AND DRY THEM. That's right, Luna 3 had a little 1 Hour Photo inside. Now you're thinking, well, how do you get those actual photos back to the Earth?

7) At this point, the photos were then moved to a device that shone a cathode ray tube, like in an older tv, through them, towards a device that recorded the brightness and converted this to an electrical signal.

8) AT THIS POINT, it had to send this electrical signal back to us from the Moon, but it wasn't powerful enough to do so, so Luna 3 had to mosey its way back to the Earth by being the first spacecraft to do a gravity assist to get back. Soviet scientists only got 17 photos.

9) But what photos! The backside of the moon was SO WEIRD AND DIFFERENT! We could see craters, but no large maria (the dark patches / ancient lava fields). It wasn't until 1964 that the NASA satellite Ranger 7 would say What's Up to the moon and transmit higher quality data.

10) ALL THIS TO SAY: Often times we focus on the American side of the space race but holy cow there was a lot of cool stuff being done to explore our solar system. Like take and develop photographs and digitize said photographs IN SPACE all ROBOTICALLY.

You can follow @Kevin_Hainline.

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