On this day in space: March 21, 1965: NASA launches Ranger 9 to the moon

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On March 21, 1965, NASA launched the Ranger 9 spacecraft on a mission to crash into a lunar crater.

On March 21, 1965, NASA launched the Ranger 9 spacecraft on a mission to crash into a lunar crater.

A model of NASA's Ranger 9 spacecraft.

A model of NASA's Ranger 9 spacecraft. (Image credit: JPL/NASA)

After launching on an Atlas-Agena rocket, Ranger 9 spent nearly three days making its way over to the moon. During the last 20 minutes of its flight, it took around 6,000 high-quality images of the moon. It then plowed into the Alphonsus crater at a speed of nearly 9,000 miles per hour.

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Images and videos from Ranger 9's descent were broadcast on live television to millions of viewers in the United States.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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