16. Fulfilling the original mission objective of Luna 1, its successor spacecraft – Luna 2 – became the first man-made object on another celestial body in September 1959
The second spacecraft in the Soviet’s eponymous program, Luna 2 was the first man-made object to reach the surface of the Moon. Following a comparable design to its predecessor, Luna 2 was projected to complete the mission its older sibling failed to accomplish. Launched on September 12, 1959, after a travel time of 38 hours Luna 2 impacted the Moon’s surface on September 13, near the craters Aristides, Archimedes, and Autolycus. Conducting experiments en route to the Moon, in particular the measuring of levels of ionizing radiation, upon its crash-landing onto the celestial object Luna 2 released a 650-kilometer wide vapor cloud capable of being seen by observatories on Earth.
The success of Luna 2 presented a momentous blow to American confidence in the Space Race. Believing they had made significant progress, achieving better guidance systems in contrast to the Soviet’s larger rockets, by September 1959 the closest the United States had come to the Moon was 37,000 miles away with Pioneer 4. This sobering reality drastically affected American domestic confidence, whilst the USSR enthusiastically embraced the event for propaganda purposes, with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev even presenting President Eisenhower with a replica of a patriotic steel pennant attached to the famed spacecraft.