Now the CIA technicians got to work. Luna 3, an automatic interplanetary station, was the third spacecraft successfully launched to the Moon and the first to return images of the lunar far side. The spacecraft returned very indistinct pictures, but, through computer enhancement, a tentative atlas of the lunar farside was produced. Date: Time (UTC) Event: 1959 Oct 4: 00:43: Luna 3 (E-2A-1) spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome by Vostok rocket on a mission to fly past and photograph the Moon by way of direct ascent trajectory. Luna 10 (March 1966) became the first artificial satellite of the Moon. Luna 3 was the third spacecraft to reach the Moon and the first to send back pictures of the Moon's far side. Luna-3 satellite. In October of 1959, the Luna 3 spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Luna flew six … Luna 3's mission objective was to provide the first photographs from the moon's far side. Art via Wikipedia.