Parting Moon Shots from NASA's GRAIL Mission

Ranger 9 was the last of the Ranger series of spacecraft launched in the 1960s to explore the moon and was designed to image and impact the moon's crater Alphonsus. Includes imagery from the onboar...

Lunar Orbiter 1 new of the Moon and crescent Earth. This is the first good image of the Earth taken from the vicinity of the Moon, 380,000 km away.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Lithograph

Depicts the dramatic voyage of Apollo 13. The most serious accident to occur in space changed the mission from a routine lunar landing to a desperate fight for crew survival.

Lunar Orbiter 4 image of the Moon centered on the Mare Orientale Basin. The outermost circle of the "bull's eye" is the Cordillera Mountain scarp, almost 900 kilometers in diameter.

This graphic highlights locations on the moon NASA considers "lunar heritage sites" and the path NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory spacecraft will take on their final flight.

Final pictures taken by the Ranger 8 P-camera about 1/2 second before impact.

The historic first landing of men on the Moon in July, 1969.

This movie shows the variations in the lunar gravity field as measured by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) during the primary mapping mission from March to May 2012.

Mosaic of images taken by the robotic lunar lander Surveyor 7

Ranger 8 image of the Moon from 302 km.

Footage of the recovery of the Apollo 8 crew

On Aug. 23, 1966, NASA's Lunar Orbiter 1 snapped the first photo of Earth as seen from lunar orbit.

A mosaic of images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter centered on the Moon's Orientale basin. 

The Moon from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

LRO - Eclipse Observations from LRO Lithograph

Since the 1960s, scientists have suspected that frozen water could survive in cold, dark craters at the moon's poles.

NASA created this chart in 1967 to illustrate the flight path and key mission events for the upcoming Apollo missions to the Moon.

The far side of Earth's Moon.

Four Ranger 8 Camera P images taken on 20 February 1965 from a distance of 20 km about 9 seconds before impact on the Moon.

The three crew members of Apollo 8 were the first humans to leave Earth orbit and the first to travel around the Moon.

Visualization of the location of all six Apollo landing sites on the Moon, along with the historical Moon phase. 

Views of the Apollo 11 landing site from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, taken on separate occasions when the Sun was at different points in the sky over the site.

Artist's rendering of the LCROSS spacecraft and Centaur separation.

A full moon rising over Launch Complex 34 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, on September 16th 2016