 Hughes Space and Communications Group and the Hughes Space Systems Division built the world's first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom, in 1963 and followed by the first geosynchronous weather satellite, ATS-1, in 1966.Later that year their Surveyor 1 made the first soft landing on the Moon as part of the lead-up to the moon landings in Project Apollo.Hughes also built Pioneer Venus in 1978, which performed the first extensive radar mapping of Venus, and the "Galileo" probe that flew to Jupiter in the 1990s.