17 November 1970
Waning Gibbous, 83% lit
The first rover on another world
Lunokhod 1 rolled off its lander and drove the Moon for ten months, steered live from Earth by a team of five.
The drivers worked from slow television images with a two-second signal delay, effectively driving blind at walking pace. It carried a retroreflector still used today to bounce lasers off the Moon and measure its distance to the centimetre.
- Date
- 17 November 1970
- Moon computed for
- 06:00 local time, UTC
- Phase
- Waning Gibbous
- Illuminated
- 83%
Source: NASA NSSDC (opens in a new tab)