Ranger 7

Ranger 7 was a NASA robotic space probe launched in 1964 that became the first fully successful mission of the Ranger program after a lengthy string of earlier failures. The spacecraft was designed to crash into the Moon, transmitting live television images of the lunar surface as it approached, and it returned thousands of images before impact on July 31, 1964, the closest and most detailed pictures of the Moon taken up to that time. Its success restored confidence in the American lunar exploration program ahead of the Surveyor and Apollo missions that followed.