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The last manned moon landing was at the end of 1972, when Apollo 17 was launched on a lunar mission. The three astronauts - Harrison Schmitt, Eugene Cernan and Ronald Evans- arrived at the moon on 17th December, with Schmitt and Cernan actually making 'moonfall' whilst Evans remained aboard the Command Module. Amongst their achievements were the use of a UV spectrometer to take the first detailed measurements of the consistency of the moon's atmopshere- they also used the Lunar Rover, that had been taken to the moon 2 years earlier by an earlier Apollo mission. However, ever since then, unmanned probes have been sent to the moon, initially by the USA and the Soviet Union, but subsequently by a number of other nations, including India, China, and the European Space Agency. They have been for the purposes of carrying out various research projects, including to look for possible sources of water beneath the lunar surface, to measure the moon's own movement in orbit, and to assess possible future sites for lunar telescopes. The most recent such probe arrived at the moon only last month- it was the Kaguya probe launched by Japan, and was a general-puropse mission to measure the topography, minerals and magnetic fields on the moon. It crashed (deliberately) onto the lunar surface on the first week of June 2009.

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16y ago

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