Image credit: NASA
THE INVISIBLE HEMISPHERE OF THE MOON
In the literature about the Moon, written in the last century, one can often find the woeful assertion that man will never see the other side of the Moon. It never occurred to our great-grandfathers that a century later a man would land on the moon, and before that, the machines he created would photograph the invisible lunar hemisphere and the “eternal” secret would be revealed. The mysterious gave rise to fantasies: nothing, of course, unsubstantiated hypotheses were put forward about the existence of life on the far side of the Moon
and even about the flourishing lunar cities that the Selenites built. Cosmonautics, alas, did not justify these hopes. The lunar hemisphere seen from the Earth turned out to be just as dead as the one facing us. But a lot of interesting things were found there. On October 7, 1959, the Luna-3 AMS for the first time flew around the Moon, photographed most of its invisible hemisphere and transmitted the resulting images to Earth.. More than 500 details, mostly craters, were discernible in these photographs.
Siegel F. Treasures of the Starry Sky: A Guide to the Constellations and the Moon.