Luna 16
Videos
Luna 16 was an uncrewed 1970 space mission, part of the Soviet Luna program. It was the first robotic probe to land on the Moon and return a sample of lunar soil to Earth. The 101 grams sample was ret
Luna 16
Luna 16 at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics
Luna 16 at the Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics
The Soviet Union 1970 CPA 3951 stamp
Sample-return mission
Videos
A sample-return mission is a spacecraft mission to collect and return samples from an extraterrestrial location to Earth for analysis. Sample-return missions may bring back merely atoms and molecules
Luna 16
…sample was returned from Mare Fecunditatis. It represented the first successful lunar sample return mission by the Soviet Union and was the third lunar sample return mission overall. The spacecraft consisted of two attached stages, an ascent stage mounted on top of a descent stage. The descent stage was a cylindrical body…
The Genesis Rock, returned by the Apollo 15 lunar mission in 1971.
The sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission shortly after touching down in the desert in Utah
A meteorite thought to be from Mars
Apollo 11 was the first mission to return extraterrestrial samples.