Scientists may have spotted a long–lost Soviet Union Lander, more than 60 years after it vanished on the surface of the moon.
On February 3, 1966, the uncrewed Luna 9 lander became the first craft to execute a soft landing on the lunar surface – three years before the US Apollo missions.
After beaming back a picture of the moon, the craft’s batteries gave out, and its chaotic landing meant that its final location became a mystery.
However, scientists now think they have finally tracked down Luna 9’s resting place.
A team of scientists designed a machine learning algorithm to trawl through hundreds of images taken by NASA‘s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
They focused their efforts on the roughly three–mile by three–mile area on the moon’s surface that the Soviets had initially targeted.
Their algorithm, dubbed ‘You–Only–Look–Once—Extraterrestrial Artifact’ (YOLO–ETA), spotted several previously unseen marks on the surface.
This area, located in the moon’s Oceanus Procellarum, even shows disturbances in the soil that could have been made by Luna 9’s tumbling descent.
Scientists believe they may have finally found the long–lost Soviet lunar lander, Luna 9, after it was lost on the moon over 60 years ago
On February 3, 1966, the uncrewed Luna 9 lander became the first craft to execute a soft landing on the lunar surface. Pictured: The Luna 9 probe on display in 1966
Luna 9 isn’t the first human object to have hit the moon, but it is the first to have survived a relatively soft landing.
Unlike the lunar lander used in 1969’s Apollo 11 mission, Luna 9 deployed a spherical landing capsule that hit the lunar surface with some considerable speed.
Just before impact, the craft fired its braking engine and inflated airbags that protected Luna 9 as it bashed into the ground at 14 miles per hour (22 km/h).
Scientists believe that the craft then bounced several times in the moon’s low gravity before coming to a rest and catching itself with four petal–like panels.
Without solar panels, Luna 9’s batteries died just three days later after transmitting just nine images back to Earth.
Thanks to poor calculations of the craft’s trajectory and a particularly chaotic descent, no one is quite sure where Luna 9 finally ended up.
However, in 2009, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter started to beam back the first high–resolution images of the moon.
Somewhere among these thousands of photos, researchers reasoned, must be an image showing Luna 9’s landing site.
Before the lander’s batteries died, it transmitted a handful of images back to Earth. These are the only clues scientists have about its possible location
Unlike most modern landers, Luna 9 deployed a spherical capsule (pictured) that deployed airbags and bounced off the surface. This chaotic landing method has made it extremely difficult to find
The challenge was finding a way to comb through such a vast amount of data to find a tiny capsule measuring just 23 inches (58 cm) in diameter.
The researchers’ solution was to train a machine learning algorithm on known lunar landing sites so that it could learn to spot the telltale signs.
Scientists let their programme ‘practice’ by finding the Apollo landing sites and the Soviet Union’s Luna 16 probe.
When it was able to find this with high accuracy under different lighting conditions, they turned it loose on images from Luna 9’s suspected landing region.
In their paper, published in the journal npj Space Exploration, the researchers identify a location around 7.029° N, –64.329° E as a strong possible candidate for Luna 9’s location.
Scattered within 200 metres of this main object, the researchers also spotted several smaller marks that could be Luna 9’s ejected components.
They write: ‘The multiple detections by YOLO–ETA within this distance range could plausibly correspond to the lander and its ejected components.’
Excitingly, the programme also identified a series of possible craters that could correspond to the impact sites of the lander and its modules.
Using a machine learning algorithm, scientists have identified an object that could be Luna 9. Compared to the images taken by the Soviet craft, the topography and horizon as seen from this spot are a plausible match
Finally, when the scientists compared their potential location to the images sent back by Luna 9, the horizon and general topography were found to be a plausible match.
‘Taken together, these results identify a small cluster of features near 7.03° N, –64.33° E that display spatial and morphological characteristics consistent with spacecraft hardware,’ the researchers add.
However, the researchers caution that the images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter aren’t clear enough to be entirely certain what they have found.
Future observations with more modern spacecraft under a variety of lighting conditions will be needed to find out more.
Luckily, India’s Chandrayaan–2 is set to launch on its mission to the Moon in March 2026, and is scheduled to fly over the same area identified by the researcher.
If those images reveal more of the potential landing site, it might finally confirm the location of the long–lost Luna 9 lander.