Lost Soviet lunar probe sparks row after two research teams claim finds at separate locations – Jalopnik

While NASA’s Apollo 11 mission is still remembered today for putting a man on the moon in 1969, the Soviet Union placed humanity’s first unmanned spacecraft on lunar soil three years earlier. A Russian-born space communicator announced last November that he had found the long-lost Luna 9 lander after a crowdsourced effort to combine NASA lunar satellite images. There’s only one problem. A team led by a researcher from University College London claims to have found the same rover in a different location using a machine learning algorithm that searches the same data.

Luna 9 landed on the moon on February 3, 1966. The probe lander designed by Sergei Korolev can best be described as an overturned interplanetary barbecue. Instead of cooking hamburgers, the 218-pound capsule carried broadcast and scientific equipment. Luna-9 descended to the surface using retrorockets and a landing airbag. The landing itself was a controlled impact at 14 miles per hour. Three days later the Soviets lost contact with Luna 9.

A rival claim from a team led by UCL researcher and SET scientist Lewis Pinault attempted to address the lack of detail in LROC QuickMap by using a machine learning algorithm. The team trained You-Only-Look-Once-Extraterrestrial Artifact (YOLO-ETA) on other man-made objects on the moon, such as the Apollo landing sites. Besides being a reference to an outdated meme, the algorithm’s name also reveals its true purpose: finding artifacts of extraterrestrial life. However, finding Luna 9 would be an incredible proof-of-concept for their work.

This debate will finally be settled in March when Chandrayaan-2, an Indian orbiter, flies over Egorov’s claimed location and takes higher-resolution images. It would be an ironic twist of fate if an Indian spacecraft were to confirm the final resting place of Luna 9. Its successor, Chandrayaan-3, defeated the revived Russian Luna program at the moon’s south pole in 2023. Luna 25 crashed onto the surface just four days before India’s successful landing.