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Mission record

Luna 1960A

Also known as Ye-3 No. 1, E-3 No. 1

Soviet Union · Launched

Explore trajectory

Failed · Failure

A Soviet lunar farside-photography attempt that received insufficient injection velocity, reached about 200,000 km above Earth, then fell back and reentered. The flight path and reentry time remain incompletely documented.

Destinations
Launch vehicle
Vostok-L 8K72
Launch site
Tyuratam (Baikonur Cosmodrome)
Countries
Soviet Union
Mission types
Flyby

Chronology

Mission timeline

  1. Launch

    Luna 1960A launched; underpowered injection led to a distant Earth trajectory

    Earth

  2. Milestone

    Probe reached about 200,000 km altitude above Earth

    The sources do not give an event time or a complete state vector.

    Earth

  3. Mission end

    Probe returned to Earth and burned up in the atmosphere

    The sources do not give an event time or a complete state vector.

    Earth

Mission architecture

Vehicles

  • Luna 1960A · Spacecraft

    Destinations: Moon

Trajectory record

Trajectory dataset not yet available

Known dates and encounters do not uniquely determine a flight path. This mission’s sourced timeline is available above; no verified trajectory is currently published here.

What is needed to reconstruct this path?
  • A frame-qualified position and vector velocity at an epoch, or equivalent complete orbital elements.
  • Finer event-time constraints where required by an orbital reconstruction; the stored day/month/year precision is retained.
  • The actual failed-flight state history. Intended destinations are not evidence that the spacecraft reached them.

Provenance

Sources

Each source is listed once and labeled with the mission, event, trajectory, or destination/body context it supports.

Data verified through October 12, 2026