All manned and unmanned soft landings had taken place on the near side of the Moon, until 3 January 2019 when the Chang'e 4 spacecraft made the first landing on the far side. The Apollo 8 astronauts were the first humans to see the far side in person when they orbited the Moon in 1968. The Soviet Academy of Sciences published the first atlas of the far side in 1960. The remaining 82 percent remained unobserved until 1959, when it was photographed by the Soviet Luna 3 space probe. Ībout 18 percent of the far side is occasionally visible from Earth due to libration. The hemisphere is sometimes called the " dark side of the Moon", where "dark" means "unknown" instead of "lacking sunlight" – each side of the Moon experiences two weeks of sunlight while the opposite side experiences two weeks of night. It has one of the largest craters in the Solar System, the South Pole–Aitken basin. Compared to the near side, the far side's terrain is rugged, with a multitude of impact craters and relatively few flat and dark lunar maria ("seas"), giving it an appearance closer to other barren places in the Solar System such as Mercury and Callisto. The far side of the Moon is the lunar hemisphere that always faces away from Earth, opposite to the near side, because of synchronous rotation in the Moon's orbit. Photograph of the far side of the Moon by Orion spacecraft during the Artemis 1 mission
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