The Soviet Union lands a palpable hit in the space race, claiming the first intact soft-landing of a man-made probe on another body in the solar system. Luna 9, a 200-pound sphere whose weighted base rolls to the correct orientation before opening petals exposing its camera and other instruments, proves that the lunar surface is dense enough to hold up heavy objects (previous scientific speculation has presented the possibility of a heavy lander sinking into a quicksand-like lunar surface).
UK broadcaster ATV Midlands airs the 19th episode of Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation science fiction series Thunderbirds, featuring the voices of Shane Rimmer, David Graham, Sylvia Anderson, Ray Barrett, and Peter Dyneley.
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The eighth episode of Batman airs on ABC. George Sanders guest stars as Mr. Freeze. (This is part two of a two-part story; each week’s story unfolds in two half-hour episodes on Monday and Tuesday.) 
The recently-rechristened Environmental Sciences Service Administration (previously the U.S. Weather Bureau) launches, with the help of NASA, the first “Operational TIROS” weather satellite, ESSA-1. Based on the architecture of the later TIROS satellites, this is intended to be the first fully-operational, long-life weather satellite, in the tradition of many of the long-lived TIROS weather satellites. But eight months into its operational lifetime, ESSA-1’s on board camera system fails, rendering it blind – it becomes useless as a weather satellite and is kept online for engineering experiments until spring 1967.