"In 1966, three years before the first humans walked on the Moon, the Soviet Union landed a small, spherical probe, dubbed Luna 9, on the lunar surface. It was a historic moment, with the spacecraft becoming the first to achieve a soft landing and return the first photo from the surface of another celestial body: a high-contrast, black-and-white image of a rugged, rocky landscape."
"In a years-long effort to track down the historic relic, science communicator Vitaly Egorov turned to crowdsourcing to scan a 62-mile-wide region on the Moon for any unusual signs. Egorov claims to have found Luna 9's final resting place, after studying the horizon features in the grainy, black-and-white image the probe sent back to Earth 60 years ago. He told the NYT that he's "fairly confident" but admitted that he doesn't "exclude an error of several meters.""
Luna 9 achieved the first soft lunar landing in 1966 and returned a high-contrast black-and-white photograph of a rugged surface. The lander's spherical core stage is about two feet across, making it extremely difficult to locate from orbit. Two research groups now claim to have found traces of the lander but propose different landing sites. Science communicator Vitaly Egorov used crowdsourcing to scan a 62-mile-wide region and says he is fairly confident of a location within several meters. NASA imaging leads caution that the object may be too small to confirm, and Chandrayaan-2 will obtain higher-resolution imagery in March. University College London researchers published a paper proposing a different landing site.
Read at Futurism
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