Humans have never visited the far side of the Moon, but we have seen it from just 97km away. On Christmas Eve 1968, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 became the first ever people to orbit a heavenly body other than Earth, Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders peered through the spacecraft’s small circular windows, looking down at a grey and cratered lunar surface gliding past below them.
“The far side looks like a pile of sand that my kids have been playing in for a while. It is completely wrecked, full of dents and holes,” Anders said later.
The far side of the Moon is thought to be different to its near side in both landscape and surface material. But scientists do not yet know this for sure, because we have no samples from the far side. From the near side, on the other hand, we
