America’s arch-enemy, the Soviet Union, attained several notable successes in space — creating the first man-made object to reach the moon, to go into orbit around the moon, and to transmit pictures of the dark side of the moon. American worry over falling behind in the space race prompted President Kennedy to reaffirm in a speech American commitment to reaching the moon, and the start of seven Surveyor missions to land a spacecraft on it.

On this day, January 7th, 1968 the last of the Surveyor missions launched towards the moon’s surface. Armed with a television camera and sophisticated surface analyzers, it would provide useful data to NASA scientists working to determine the composition of the moon. The Surveyor 7 was the first to detect a faint glow, as if from sunlight in an atmosphere, on the lunar horizon.

The Surveyor 7 was the first American artificial object to achieve a soft landing on the moon, but it came two years after a Russian Luna 9 spacecraft safely landed and transmitted panoramas of the moon’s surface.