The far side of the Moon was observed for the first time in 1959, thanks to the USSR's Luna 3 space mission.
The radio-controlled Luna 3 lunar program was a huge success, with 20 missions to the Moon conducted between January 1959 and October 1970. The AFA-E1 camera on the space mission captured almost 29 pictures, which were promptly relayed back to Earth. On this day, October 7, 1959, the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 snapped approximately 29 pictures of the Moon's far side for the first time.
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In 1941, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the Manhattan Project, an atomic endeavor.
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In 2012, Malala Yousafzai, a women's rights and education campaigner was shot three times by a Taliban gunman as she attempted to board her school bus in the Swat area of northwest Pakistan.
In 1793, at the age of 56, John Hancock, an American businessman and statesman who was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence, died.
Edgar Allan Poe, an American writer, poet, and critic often regarded as the creator of the detective fiction genre, died in Baltimore in 1849 at the age of 40.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine Marxist revolutionary and surgeon, was killed in Bolivia in 1967 at the age of 39.