Wow, I had never heard of this before... in 1970, and again in 1973, the Russians
landed remote-controlled rovers on the moon in a program called Lunokhod. The rovers had basic instrumentation and took thousands of photos. Nifty.
Those Russian scientists came out with some pretty neat stuff back when they actually had some money to work with. This makes me wonder how many of their other innovations I've never heard of. Unfortunately, they're usually better known for the creations they
blatantly copied and
stole.