Why do we always see the same face of the Moon? Earth has just one Moon. The Moon goes around Earth in a path called an orbit. It spins exactly once for every trip it makes around Earth, which is why the same side always faces us. This is called tidal locking.
Now think about the side we never see, the far side. People sometimes call it the dark side. That is misleading, because the far side gets sunlight too. The Moon does not make its own light. The Sun always lights half of the Moon.
Until a Soviet spacecraft flew past in 1959, nobody had seen the far side of the Moon. Dark lava plains called maria cover much of the near side of the Moon but are almost missing from the far side. Maria is a Latin word for seas.
Galileo used a telescope to see that the Moon has mountains and craters and is not smooth.
The Soviet Luna 2 was the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon. It did not land gently: it made a hard-impact crash landing, and the impact destroyed the spacecraft. The Soviet Luna 9 lander transmitted the first photographs taken from the surface of the Moon.
Apollo 8 in 1968 was the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon. In 1969 people landed. Apollo 11, the mission that first landed people on the Moon, lifted off on July 16, 1969. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon in Eagle, Michael Collins stayed in orbit in the command module Columbia. Armstrong flew the last part of the landing partly by hand and set Eagle down in the Sea of Tranquility. In 1969, he became the first person to walk on the Moon.
Gravity on the Moon is about one-sixth as strong as on Earth, so astronauts seemed to bounce as they walked. The Moon has so little air that a footprint left there can last for centuries or longer. Its days are very hot and its nights are very cold. In full sunlight its surface can pass 250 degrees Fahrenheit. In darkness it can fall below minus 240 degrees Fahrenheit. Lunar soil, called regolith, is pulverized rock made by countless meteorite impacts over geologic time.
On Apollo 17, astronaut Harrison Schmitt spotted orange soil near the rim of Shorty Crater on the Moon. The astronauts also fixed a broken fender on their moon car, the lunar rover, with duct tape and taped-together maps. People have landed on the Moon on six Apollo missions: Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. As of November 2026, no one has walked on the Moon since Apollo 17 left in December 1972.
As of November 2026: Artemis II was a trip around the Moon with astronauts on board. It launched on April 1, 2026, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew were NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. As of November 2026, they set a new record for the greatest distance humans have traveled from Earth. As of November 2026, the Moon is the only place beyond Earth that people have ever visited.
Words to know
- orbit: path around Earth
- maria: dark lava plains
- crewed: with people aboard
- regolith: moon soil
