Overview
- An international team led by Lewis Pinault reported in npj Space Exploration that a lightweight model called YOLO-ETA flagged a cluster of candidate artefacts near about 7.03° N, −64.33° E in NASA LROC images.
- Independent researcher Vitaly Egorov proposed a different site after crowdsourced searches and horizon matching with Luna 9 panoramas, saying he is fairly confident he found the area.
- India’s Chandrayaan-2 orbiter is scheduled to target passes over the candidate regions in March 2026 to collect higher-resolution images for verification.
- Experts caution that neither set of detections is conclusive given Luna 9’s small size and LROC’s limits, noting that only targeted, sharper imaging can confirm the lander’s location.
- The AI approach was validated on known Apollo sites and Luna 16, and researchers say it could help catalog human-made artefacts on the Moon where Pravda’s imprecise 1966 coordinates left a broad search area.