50 Years Ago: Humanity’s ‘First Lunar Orbiter Was Programmed to Sing Communist Anthems’
But before the US ultimately overtook the USSR with the Apollo program, the Luna program scored a few more important “firsts” with Luna 9 and 10. In contrast to the program’s years of ill-fated soft-landing attempts, Luna 10 was only the Soviets’ second shot at placing a satellite into lunar orbit. This achievement helped to counteract the dizzying freefall of the Luna program over the preceding five years, and helped to somewhat recover its reputation and image worldwide.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
