Back in 1966, a robot, roughly the size of a beach ball, made history by gently bouncing onto the lunar surface. After settling, its four petal-like panels unfurled, revealing a camera that then captured and transmitted the very first images ever seen from another world.
This remarkable feat was achieved by Luna 9, a Soviet lander that was the first spacecraft to successfully soft-land on the Moon. This mission truly kickstarted interplanetary exploration, yet the exact resting place of Luna 9 has been an enduring mystery – until now.
The good news is, this may no longer be the case. Two independent research teams believe they’ve finally pinpointed the long-lost remnants of Luna 9. However, there’s a fascinating twist: their proposed locations don’t match.
As Anatoly Zak, a respected space journalist and author, quipped, “One of them is wrong.” He was the first to report on this intriguing development last week.
These conflicting discoveries shed light on a peculiar aspect of the early space race: many spacecraft that either crashed or soft-landed on the Moon before NASA’s Apollo missions have since vanished into obscurity. Luckily, a new wave of lunar missions might finally bring these hidden artifacts to light.
Luna 9 began its journey to the Moon on January 31, 1966. At a time when many lunar missions ended in crashes, Luna 9 was one of the first to attempt a ‘soft landing’ – a controlled descent to the surface. Its scientific instrument core, a sphere about two feet in diameter, is notoriously hard to detect from lunar orbit.
Mark Robinson, a geologist with Intuitive Machines (a company that has successfully landed spacecraft on the Moon twice), emphasized this challenge, stating, “Luna 9 is a very, very small vehicle.”
Dr. Robinson, who also leads the camera team for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LROC), noted that while LROC has been meticulously mapping the Moon since 2009 with incredible detail, capable of resolving features down to a few square feet, Luna 9’s tiny dimensions push the very limits of its detection capabilities.
He explained, “You can stare at an image, and maybe that’s it, but you can’t really know for sure.”
Nevertheless, this difficulty hasn’t deterred the tenacious research teams from meticulously sifting through LROC’s extensive imagery.
Vitaly Egorov, a Russian-born science communicator behind the Zelenyikot space blog, has dedicated years to the hunt for Luna 9. He recently reignited the search through a unique crowdsourcing initiative. Recognizing the rudimentary tracking methods of 1966, he broadened the search zone to a vast 62-mile-wide area, broadcasting LROC data live for his audience to scrutinize for any unusual pixels that could indicate the lander’s presence.
Egorov meticulously analyzed Luna 9’s original panoramic images, seeking to align their distinctive horizon features with details visible from orbit. He also extensively utilized LROC QuickMap, a valuable online tool that transforms LROC’s orbital data into a navigable, Street View-like representation of the lunar surface.
He recounted, “One day, the landscape looked familiar. I ‘looked around’ and realized this was the same place Luna 9 had seen.”
Egorov expressed “fair confidence” in his virtual discovery of the correct landing zone. However, he admitted uncertainty about the precise pixel representing the metallic lander’s gleam, acknowledging, “I do not exclude an error of several meters.”
To definitively confirm his findings, a second spacecraft is needed: Chandrayaan-2, an Indian orbiter circling the Moon since 2019. This orbiter boasts a slightly higher-resolution camera, and Indian scientists have agreed to capture images of Egorov’s proposed landing site this March.
Interestingly, even before Egorov’s announcement, a separate team, spearheaded by Lewis Pinault, a researcher from the University College London/Birkbeck’s Centre for Planetary Sciences, unveiled their own distinct candidate site for Luna 9 last month in the journal npj Space Exploration.
Dr. Pinault’s team created a sophisticated machine-learning algorithm named You-Only-Look-Once–Extraterrestrial Artefact (YOLO-ETA). This algorithm was meticulously trained using existing NASA data on known lunar artifacts, including the Apollo mission landing sites.
Their system identified several potential Luna 9 landing spots, all within a few miles of the historically recorded coordinates. One location particularly caught their attention: an image featuring a bright pixel, possibly the spherical lander itself, flanked by two darker areas that could represent the halves of its deployed airbag shell. This team also leveraged LROC QuickMap in their analysis.
Dr. Pinault stated, “At the least, we have detected an unknown artifact. I’m very optimistic that, maybe, it could be the Luna 9.”
Although locating the Soviet lander would be thrilling, Dr. Pinault’s overarching research goal extends further: to identify potential alien artifacts on the Moon and throughout our solar system. He believes his methods could help distinguish anomalous debris from known space junk, hinting at the presence of extraterrestrial technologies.
As an affiliate scientist at the SETI Institute, Dr. Pinault confessed, “This is a bit of my obsession.”
Philip Stooke, a professor emeritus and adjunct research professor at the University of Western Ontario, a veteran in tracking lunar artifacts, offered guidance to both teams. However, he cautioned that neither site presented undeniable proof of Luna 9’s presence.
In an email, Dr. Stooke explained that a complete landing site should reveal five distinct components of the spacecraft’s landing system, alongside a tell-tale bright patch created by thrusters displacing dust. While he found neither site fully convincing, he conceded that “Egorov’s is better.”
Jeffrey Plescia, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who has also pursued Luna 9, leaned slightly towards Egorov’s proposed site. His reasoning was the remarkable correlation with the horizon details visible in the probe’s original panoramic images.
Dr. Plescia commented, “I think he’s got a good case. But I don’t know how you’d prove it without higher-resolution pictures.”
Now, space archaeologists eagerly await the data from the Indian moon orbiter. Should that prove inconclusive, they might need to exercise patience until future lunar missions, such as Firefly’s private Elytra spacecraft, take flight.
Beyond Luna 9, these upcoming observations could also help locate its almost identical successor, Luna 13, as well as various missing components from NASA’s own Surveyor and Apollo programs.
Zak, the Russian spaceflight expert, confidently predicted, “It’s just a matter of placing bigger and better cameras into orbit around the moon. In our lifetimes, we probably will see those sites.”
Experts agree that the ongoing search for Luna 9 holds significant value, not least in honoring its groundbreaking legacy.
Back in 1966, humanity was still unsure if a safe lunar landing was even possible. Some theories even suggested the Moon’s surface was blanketed in treacherous, quicksand-like dust, ready to swallow any arriving spacecraft.
While the Soviet Union ultimately didn’t achieve its goal of landing cosmonauts on the Moon, Luna 9’s mission delivered crucial ‘ground-truth’ data, directly contributing to the eventual success of six Apollo crewed lunar landings.
For Egorov, who relocated to Montenegro due to his opposition to the invasion of Ukraine, the quest for Luna 9’s remnants serves as a powerful symbol of humanity’s greatest shared aspirations.
He concluded, “I hope my work encourages at least someone to look up at the stars, the moon and Mars, and admire not only their beauty but also our ability to explore them.”
Becky Ferreira is the author of ‘First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession With Aliens.’