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The first soft landing anyone can find.

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It was not the first.

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The Soviet Luna 9 landed softly four months earlier, on 3 February 1966, but NASA's table says the place published for it is probably at least 10 km out, direction unknown.

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Surveyor 1 shut off its engines 3.4 m up and dropped the rest of the way.

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The first people.

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Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stayed 21 hours and 36 minutes.

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Their whole walk covered about 250 metres, and neither went more than about 100 m from the lander.

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Michael Collins waited for them in orbit.

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A visit to an older robot.

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On their second walk they went over to Surveyor 3 and brought about 10 kg of it home to study, its TV camera included.

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That camera is on show at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

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Seventy-five hours, then a long quiet.

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Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, the first scientist to walk on the Moon, stayed 75 hours and covered 30 km with their rover.

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After them robots landed three more times, and then nothing landed softly on the Moon for 37 years.

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The side that never faces us.

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From here the Earth is always below the horizon, so the Moon itself blocks any radio link home.

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China first put a relay satellite, Queqiao, out beyond the Moon, and the lander spoke to Earth through it.

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Its rover, Yutu 2, was still driving four years later.

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Near the south pole.

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India's first try, Chandrayaan-2, carried a lander also called Vikram, and it crashed in September 2019 about 110 km from here.

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This one was built to work for one lunar day, about 14 Earth days, and was put to sleep on 4 September 2023.

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An eclipse, seen from the Moon.

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It carried ten NASA instruments.

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On 14 March 2025 it watched the Earth pass in front of the Sun, a total eclipse seen from the Moon.

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Two days later it filmed the sunset, looking for a glow over the horizon that Gene Cernan saw on Apollo 17.

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Twenty-eight landings, nineteen on this map.

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NASA's table of what lies on the Moon, last updated in August 2025, lists 28 landings, six of them with people aboard.

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This map marks 19 of them, two by where their rovers stopped.

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Luna 9, the first of all, is not one: nobody knows exactly where it is.

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Io, the moon Jupiter never lets rest.

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Io goes round Jupiter every 42 hours, pulled one way by the planet and the other by two moons further out, in time with it.

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All that kneading has to go somewhere, and it comes out of hundreds of volcanoes.

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Europa, and the two ships on their way.

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Under that ice is twice as much water as every ocean on Earth put together.

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Europa Clipper reaches Jupiter in April 2030 to fly past here 49 times and ask whether anything could live down there; Europe's JUICE arrives in 2031 and ends up circling Ganymede.

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Saturn, and a ring ten metres thick.

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The rings reach eighty thousand kilometres out from the equator and in places are ten metres from top to bottom.

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They are almost all water ice.

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Cassini circled here for thirteen years and finished by flying into the planet in September 2017.

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Enceladus, spraying its ocean into space.

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Cassini found the jets in 2005, coming off the south pole at four hundred metres a second, and flew straight through them.

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They carry water, salt, silica and more organic material than anyone expected, and they have not stopped: the dust keeps one of Saturn's outer rings supplied.

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Triton, going the wrong way round.

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One spacecraft has ever visited Neptune: Voyager 2, on 25 August 1989.

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Five hours after passing the planet it flew by Triton, forty thousand kilometres up, and found a surface at minus 235 degrees with geysers going off on it.

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Pluto and Charon, going round each other.

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New Horizons crossed this pair on 14 July 2015, nine and a half years out from Earth.

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It found mountains of water ice, and beside them a plain of nitrogen ice that is still slowly turning over.

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Sending the pictures home took until October 2016.

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Voyager 1, and everything behind it.

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It passed Jupiter in March 1979 and Saturn in November 1980, and it has been leaving ever since, more than 170 times the Earth's distance from the Sun.

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In 1990 it turned round and photographed the planets it had left.

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Earth came out 0.12 of a pixel wide.