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15h ago

Two Candidate Sites for Long‑Lost Luna 9 Flagged in LRO Images by AI and Crowdsourced Sleuthing

Higher‑resolution passes by India’s Chandrayaan‑2 in March could verify whether the newly spotted features are the 1966 lander.

National Space Science Data Center
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A conceptual rendering drawing of how the Luna 9 flight module might be seen from the lander’s camera (Wikimedia Commons PD and NASA/GSFC/ASU).
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Overview

  • A University College London team reports YOLO‑ETA detections near about 7.03° N, −64.33° E in Oceanus Procellarum, publishing the findings on January 21 in npj Space Exploration.
  • The AI model, trained on Apollo sites, achieved an F1 of roughly 0.60, averaged 80% confidence on lander detections, and correctly localized the Soviet Luna 16 site during validation.
  • Science communicator Vitaly Egorov’s separate, crowdsourced horizon‑matching search of LRO imagery points to another site several miles away.
  • The UCL candidate lies within roughly three miles of the Soviet era estimate, while Egorov’s pick is about 15 miles from it, underscoring uncertainty from Luna 9’s bouncing descent.
  • Planetary experts caution that current LRO pixel scales and ambiguous soil disturbances fall short of definitive hardware signatures, with one noting that expected multi‑component debris is not clearly visible.