{"id":479525,"date":"2026-02-20T08:14:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T08:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/479525\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T08:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T08:14:08","slug":"lost-soviet-moon-probe-sparks-quarrel-after-two-research-teams-claim-find-in-different-locations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/479525\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost Soviet Moon Probe Sparks Quarrel After Two Research Teams Claim Find In Different Locations"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n
\n
\n <\/p>\n


\n <\/p>\n


\n
\n
\n \"A <\/p>\n

Laika ac \/ Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n

While NASA’s Apollo 11 mission is still remembered today for putting a man on the Moon in 1969, the Soviet Union<\/a> put humanity’s first uncrewed spacecraft on lunar soil three years earlier. A Russian-born space communicator announced last November that he found the long-lost Luna 9 lander after a crowdsourced effort combining NASA lunar satellite imagery. There’s just one problem. A team led by a University College London researcher claims to have found the same rover in a different location using a machine-learning algorithm scouring the same data.<\/p>\n

Luna 9 touched down on the Moon on February 3, 1966. The Sergei Korolev-designed<\/a> probe lander could be best described as an overturned interplanetary barbecue grill. Instead of cooking burgers, the 218-pound capsule carried broadcast and scientific equipment. Luna-9 descended to the surface through the use of retrorockets and a landing airbag. The landing itself was a controlled 14-mph impact. The Soviets lost contact with Luna 9 three days later.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

History will be confirmed by the victors<\/p>\n


\n
\n
\n \"Chandrayaan-2 <\/p>\n

U R Rao Satellite Centre<\/p>\n

Because of Luna 9’s small size and the relatively low-tech nature of 1960s spaceflight, the lander’s precise location is unknown. According to the New York Times<\/a>, space blogger Vitaly Egorov spent years trying to find the probe. Through matching the landscape captured by Luna 9’s cameras with similar terrain on NASA’s LROC QuickMap. The website is basically Google Maps for the Moon. The only problem is that the source data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera isn’t detailed.<\/p>\n

A rival claim by a team led by UCL researcher and SET scientist Lewis Pinault sought to address the lack of detail in LROC QuickMap by using a machine-learning algorithm. The team trained You-Only-Look-Once\u2013Extraterrestrial Artefact (YOLO-ETA) on other man-made objects on the Moon, such as the Apollo landing sites. Besides being a reference to a dated meme, the algorithm’s name also reveals its true purpose: to find artifacts of extraterrestrial life. However, finding Luna 9 would be an incredible proof of concept for their work.<\/p>\n

This debate will ultimately be settled in March when Chandrayaan-2, an Indian orbiter, overflies Egorov’s claimed site and takes higher-resolution photos. It would be an ironic twist of fate for an Indian spacecraft to confirm the final resting place of Luna 9. Its successor, Chandrayaan-3, beat Russia’s revived Luna program to the lunar south pole in 2023. Luna 25 crashed into the surface<\/a> just four days before India’s successful landing.<\/p>\n


\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Laika ac \/ Wikimedia Commons While NASA’s Apollo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479526,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[79,193],"class_list":["post-479525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}