Nearly six decades after it made history for the first soft landing on a celestial body other than Earth, a tiny Soviet robot may have finally have been traced—to two different spots on the moon. Two research teams say they've independently zeroed in on what could be Luna 9, the two-foot-wide lander that transmitted the first photos from the moon's surface in February 1966, though their proposed locations don't match, per the New York Times. "One of them is wrong," says space journalist Anatoly Zak, underscoring how murky the early moon race remains: the exact resting spots of several Soviet and NASA craft from that era are still unknown. Luna 9 operated for just three days before losing contact with Earth, per IFL Science.
On one side is Russian-born space blogger Vitaly Egorov, who crowdsourced a hunt through NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery and matched lunar horizons in the last photos Luna 9 sent home to a precise spot, give or take a few meters. On the other is a team led by University College London researcher Lewis Pinault, whose machine-learning tool reviewed the same imagery and flagged a patch of pixels as the possible lander. Experts say neither case is airtight and higher-resolution imagery is needed. That may come as soon as March, when India's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter is expected to take a closer look—possibly solving a 60-year-old mystery and helping space "archaeologists" track other lost lunar hardware.
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