Completed · Success
The first spacecraft to achieve a lunar soft landing and to transmit photographic data from the Moon's surface to Earth, preceding the U.S. Surveyor 1 soft lander by about 4 months; it returned four panoramas from Oceanus Procellarum before its batteries ran out on 6 February 1966.
- Destinations
- Launch vehicle
- Modified SS-6 (Sapwood) with 2nd Generation Upper Stage + Escape Stage
- Launch site
- Tyuratam (Baikonur Cosmodrome), U.S.S.R
- Countries
- Soviet Union
- Mission types
- Lander
Chronology
Mission timeline
Deployment
Luna 9 landing capsule separated
Mission architecture
Vehicles
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.
- Independent descent/return states and a source-defined body-fixed landing location; a landing date alone does not define either.
- Separate state histories and release epochs for the listed vehicles; a parent mission trajectory cannot be assigned to every component.
- Finer event-time constraints where required by an orbital reconstruction; the stored day/month/year precision is retained.
- The NASA initial site is probably at least 10 km from the lander; a closer 2026 machine-learning candidate remains unconfirmed and lacks a qualified covariance.
Provenance
Sources
Each source is listed once and labeled with the mission, event, trajectory, or destination/body context it supports.
Data verified through August 24, 2026
- Luna 9 - NASA NSSDCA Spacecraft Details — NSSDCAArchive · Supports: mission claims · event claims
- Luna 9 mission, spacecraft and orbital records — NSSDCATechnical document · Supports: mission claims · event claims
- First Panoramas of the Lunar Surface According to Materials of the Automatic Station Luna-9 (1966), NASA-CR-94656 — NASATechnical document · Supports: mission claims
- Table of Anthropogenic Impacts and Spacecraft on the Moon — NSSDCAArchive · Supports: mission claims
- Pinault, Crawford and Yano (2026), Possible identification of the Luna 9 Moon landing site using a novel machine learning algorithm — OTHERTechnical document · Supports: mission claims
- DE421 lunar mean-Earth and principal-axes frame specification — NAIFTechnical document · Supports: destination/body context
- DE440 lunar mean-Earth and principal-axes frame specification — NAIFSpice · Supports: destination/body context
- IAU rotational elements and body radii (PCK 00011) — NAIFSpice · Supports: destination/body context
- LOLA global lunar height maps, LDEM_4 V3 original PDS source label — NASATechnical document · Supports: destination/body context
- LOLA 2023 south-polar elevation, uncertainty and effective-resolution maps — NASATechnical document · Supports: destination/body context
- Blue Ghost Lunar Lander Seen From Above: LROC site and terrain context — NASATechnical document · Supports: destination/body context
- Moon Facts — NASAOther · Supports: destination/body context
- SLDEM2015 Blue Ghost region: original PDS elevation-grid label — NASATechnical document · Supports: destination/body context
- JPL Solar System Dynamics Astrodynamic Parameters — JPLOther · Supports: destination/body context
- Planet Sizes and Locations in Our Solar System — NASAOther · Supports: destination/body context