![]() ![]() Indian astronomer Aryabhata stated in his fifth-century text Aryabhatiya that reflected sunlight is what causes the Moon to shine. Shen Kuo of the Song Dynasty created an allegory equating the waxing and waning of the Moon to a round ball of reflective silver that, when doused with white powder and viewed from the side, would appear to be a crescent. Mathematician and astrologer Jing Fang noted the sphericity of the Moon. Aristarchus attempted to compute the Moon's size and distance from Earth, although his estimated distance of 20 times Earth's radius (which had been accurately determined by his contemporary Eratosthenes) proved to be about a third the actual average distance.Ĭhinese philosophers of the Han Dynasty believed the Moon to be energy equated to qi but recognized that the light of the Moon was a reflection of the Sun. ![]() He also entertained the possibility that the Moon was inhabited. Plutarch, in his book On the Face in the Moon's Orb, suggested that the Moon had deep recesses in which the light of the Sun did not reach and that the spots are nothing but the shadows of rivers or deep chasms. The ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, whose non-religious view of the heavens was one cause for his imprisonment and eventual exile, reasoned that the Sun and Moon were both giant spherical rocks, and that the latter reflected the light of the former. The first soft landing on the far side of the Moon was made by the Chinese robotic spacecraft Chang'e 4 in early 2019, which successfully deployed the Yutu-2 robotic lunar rover. The first landing took place in 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong left scientific instruments and returned lunar samples to Earth. NASA's Apollo program was the only program to successfully land humans on the Moon, which it did six times. Galileo Galilei is generally credited as the first person to use a telescope for astronomical purposes having made his own telescope in 1609, the mountains and craters on the lunar surface were among his first observations using it. The invention of the optical telescope brought about the first leap in the quality of lunar observations. Prior to that the only available means of exploration had been observation from Earth. The physical exploration of the Moon began when Luna 2, a space probe launched by the Soviet Union, made an impact on the surface of the Moon on September 14, 1959. Apollo 12 Lunar Module Intrepid prepares to descend towards the surface of the Moon. ![]()
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