Luna 5 was an unmanned space mission of the Luna program, also called Lunik 5. It was designed to continue investigations of a lunar soft landing. The retrorocket system failed, and the spacecraft impacted the lunar surface at the Sea of Clouds.
In May 1965, Luna 5 became the first Soviet probe to head for the Moon in two years. Following the midcourse correction on 10 May, the spacecraft began spinning around its main axis due to a problem in a flotation gyroscope in the I-100 guidance system unit. A subsequent attempt to fire the main engine failed because of ground control error, and the engine never fired. After loss of control as a result of the gyroscope problem, Luna 5 crashed. Landing coordinates were 31° south latitude and 8° west longitude. It was the second Soviet spacecraft to land on the Moon (following Luna 2 in 1959).
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Lunas were the first manmade objects to attain of escape velocity; to impact on the moon; to photograph the far side of the moon; to soft land on the moon; to retrieve and return lunar surface samples to the earth; and to deploy a lunar rover on the moon's surface.
Luna 12 was launched towards the Moon from an earth-orbiting platform and achieved a lunar orbit of of 100 km x 1740 km on October 25, 1966.
Luna 16 was launched toward the Moon from a preliminary earth orbit and entered a lunar orbit on September 17, 1970.
Luna 4, also called Lunik 4, was the USSR's first successful spacecraft of their "second generation" Luna program.
Luna 4, the second attempt of this program, achieved the desired trajectory but missed the Moon by 8336.2 km at 13:25 UT on April 5, 1963 and entered a barycentric[?] 90,000 x 700,000 km Earth orbit.
The intended mission of the probe is not known, it was speculated the probe was designed to land on the Moon with an instrument package based on the trajectory and on the later attempted landings of the Luna5 and Luna 6 spacecraft.
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