The Far Side
The side we never see
The Moon always shows Earth the same face. Its far side stayed hidden until 1959 and was not landed on until 2019. And no, it is not dark.
NASA/NOAA, DSCOVR EPIC camera, July 2015. Public domain.
Why we only see one side: tidal locking
Earth sees: the near side (red dot)
A common surprise: the Moon does spin. It turns exactly once for every trip around Earth, about every 27.3 days. Because the two match, the same half always faces us. This is called tidal locking or synchronous rotation.
Try the second button. If the Moon did not spin at all, it would keep pointing the same way in space, and over a month Earth would see every side of it.
How did it happen? Earth's gravity stretched the young Moon into a slight egg shape. While the Moon spun faster, Earth kept tugging on that bulge, and friction inside the Moon slowly braked its spin until the bulge stayed pointed at Earth. Most large moons in the solar system are locked to their planets the same way.
Thanks to a slight rocking called libration, caused by the Moon's tilted, slightly oval orbit, we can see about 59% of its surface from Earth over time, never all of it.
The "dark side" myth
Fact: The far side gets just as much sunlight as the near side. Day and night sweep around the whole Moon once a month. At new moon, when the side facing us looks dark, the far side is in full sunlight. The old phrase "dark side" really meant "unknown", and Pink Floyd's 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon made it famous.
Flip the Moon
Tap the Moon to flip between the side we see and the side we don't.
Near side: NASA/GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio. Far side: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University LROC mosaic. Public domain.
The two faces look like different worlds. Dark maria cover about 31% of the near side but only about 2% of the far side, which is bright, rugged and packed with craters. The far side's crust is thicker, so lava rarely broke through. It also hosts the largest impact basin on the Moon, the South Pole–Aitken basin, about 2,500 km across.
Turn the globe
Drag to rotate. Map: NASA SVS CGI Moon Kit, public domain.
Exploring the far side
- 7 Oct 1959, Luna 3. The Soviet probe took the first photos of the far side and radioed them back. Grainy as they were, they showed it had almost no maria.
- Dec 1968, Apollo 8. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders became the first people to see the far side with their own eyes.
- 2009 onward, LRO. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mapped the whole Moon in detail.
- 3 Jan 2019, Chang'e 4. China made the first soft landing on the far side, in Von Kármán crater, with the Yutu-2 rover. Because the Moon blocks direct radio contact with Earth, it talked to home through the Queqiao relay satellite.
- June 2024, Chang'e 6. The first samples from the far side: about 1.9 kg of rock and soil collected in the South Pole–Aitken basin and returned to Earth on 25 June 2024.
- April 2026, Artemis II. Four astronauts flew around the Moon on NASA's Orion spacecraft and photographed the far side, the first people to see it since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The far side is also the quietest place nearby for radio astronomy: the Moon itself blocks the radio noise from Earth, which is why astronomers would love to build radio telescopes there.
Quick answers
Is there a dark side of the Moon?
No. The far side gets as much sunlight as the near side. It is fully lit at new moon. "Dark side" is an old expression meaning "unknown".
Why do we always see the same side of the Moon?
The Moon is tidally locked: it spins once on its axis in the same time it takes to orbit Earth (about 27.3 days), so the same face always points toward us.
Does the Moon rotate?
Yes, once every 27.3 days relative to the stars. If it did not rotate, we would see all of its sides over a month.
How much of the Moon can we see from Earth?
About 59% over time, because of libration, a slight rocking caused by the Moon's tilted and slightly oval orbit. At any one moment we see at most half.
Has anyone landed on the far side?
Yes. China's Chang'e 4 made the first soft landing on 3 January 2019, and Chang'e 6 brought back the first far-side samples in June 2024. No person has landed there yet.
Why does the far side look so different?
Its crust is thicker, so very little lava erupted to make dark maria. Only about 2% of the far side is covered by maria, compared with about 31% of the near side.
Sources and credits
- NASA Science, The Moon from the other side and tidal locking.
- NASA NSSDCA, Luna 3.
- NASA, DSCOVR: Moon crossing the face of Earth (August 2015).
- Li, C. et al. (2019), Chang'e-4 initial spectroscopic identification of lunar far-side mantle-derived materials, Nature 569; CNSA mission announcements.
- China National Space Administration, Chang'e 6 sample return (25 June 2024; 1,935.3 g).
- NASA Artemis II mission pages and image gallery (April 2026).
- NASA Science, Moon facts: maria coverage of near side and far side; libration.
Photos credited to NASA, NOAA and other public-domain sources are used with thanks; BotBuhdy adds a small botbuhdy.com mark. Pictures labelled AI-generated illustration are artist-style illustrations made for this page, not photographs.