Every spacecraft that has reached the lunar surface since 1959 — soft landings, sample returns, deliberate impacts and crashes — placed on the side of the Moon it came down on. Press play: 51 arrivals crowd the near side and only 7 have ever reached the far side, where nothing came down intact until Chang'e 4 in 2019. The south-polar disc stays empty until 1999, then fills in a single generation. Tap or hover any site.
Data & source
Source: Wikipedia,
List of landings on extraterrestrial bodies
(the Earth's-Moon table), CC BY-SA 4.0 · fetched —.
Lunar basemap: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio,
CGI Moon Kit, public domain.
Scope: craft that reached the surface — soft landings, sample returns, deliberate
impacts and crashes. It is not every object on the Moon: spent rocket stages, Apollo
ascent-stage disposals and orbiters that decayed on their own are outside the source
table, and rows published without a landing point (Apollo 13's S-IVB, missions not yet
flown) are dropped. Coordinates for the earliest Soviet impacts are estimates, and a few
crash sites are known only approximately. Near side and far side are split at 90° east
and west — libration rocks the Moon a few degrees over a month, so Earth actually sees a
little way past that line. The south-polar disc is a zoom on 60° S to the pole, so the
nine sites in it also appear, squashed against the limb, on the hemisphere they belong to.