00:00On this day in space.
00:03In 1970, the Soviet Union's Luna-16 moon probe landed on the moon to retrieve a soil sample.
00:09Four days later, it became the first robotic spacecraft to return a sample of lunar soil to Earth.
00:14Luna-16 made a soft landing on the lunar surface in a mare known as the Sea of Fertility,
00:19where it retrieved 101 grams of lunar soil.
00:22It was the first robotic spacecraft to succeed in landing on the moon,
00:25scooping up a soil sample and returning it to Earth.
00:28Before Luna-16, the Soviet space program had tried and failed five times to return a sample from the moon.
00:33Overall, this was the third lunar sample brought to Earth.
00:36NASA's Apollo 11 and 12 missions had also brought some rocks and soil back from the moon.
00:41Back on Earth, tiny portions of moon dust retrieved from Luna-16
00:44were eventually auctioned off for almost half a million dollars.
00:48And that's what happened on this day in space.
00:51NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
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