On this day in space: Jan. 8, 1973: Soviet Union launches 2nd lunar rover

On January 8, 1973, the Soviet Union launched the Luna 21 mission to land a rover on the moon. This was the second time that the Soviet Union put a rover on the moon, and it was the 13th successful lunar landing of the Luna program.

The Soviet Union's Luna 21 moon lander is seen on the lunar surface in this view from the Lunokhod 2 rover it carried in at Le Monnier Crater in January 1973. (Image credit: Roskosmos & Russian Academy of Sciences, via V.I. Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry)

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Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.

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