Two Teams Propose Different Sites for Luna 9

Two research teams have proposed competing locations for Luna 9, the Soviet lander that made the first soft touchdown on the moon in 1966. Anatoly Zak cautioned, “One of them is wrong,” underscoring how the precise resting places of several early lunar spacecraft remain uncertain.

Vitaly Egorov revived a crowdsourced search using images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, expanding the target to a 62-mile-wide region and live-streaming data so viewers could hunt for small, out-of-place pixels. He matched features in Luna 9’s panoramic images to orbital views and said he was “fairly confident” he had found the right area, though he allowed for an error of several meters; the Indian orbiter Chandrayaan-2 has agreed to image his target in March to try to confirm the find.

A separate team led by Lewis Pinault trained a machine-learning system called You-Only-Look-Once–Extraterrestrial Artefact (YOLO-ETA) on known lunar artifacts and scanned LROC data.

luna 9, anatoly zak, vitaly egorov, lewis pinault, yolo-eta, lroc data, lro, chandrayaan-2, crowdsourced search, machine learning