Luna 9 Moon lander may be located at two different sites

Two independent teams have each identified different candidate landing sites for the historic Luna 9 lander in Oceanus Procellarum, and follow-up orbital imaging is planned to test those claims.

Luna 9, the Soviet lander that took the first pictures from the Moon's surface in 1966, has not been definitively located in orbital photos. Recently two independent search efforts flagged different candidate sites in Oceanus Procellarum using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. One effort, led by Lewis Pinault, used a machine learning algorithm developed for finding man-made artifacts on lunar images. The other effort, led by journalist Vitaly Egorov, relied on manual comparison of LROC imagery with Luna 9's original surface panorama. Key points: - The Soviet program reported landing coordinates of 7.08°N, 64.37°W, and searches have focused around that area. - Pinault's team ran the YOLO-ETA machine learning algorithm over roughly 25 square kilometers (about 9 square miles) and published a candidate in the journal Space Exploration that includes a bright pixel and nearby darker marks that might be debris. - Egorov searched a broader area of about 62 square miles using manual image matching and narrowed his preferred location to roughly a 400 square meter patch with several bright pixels. - Planetary imaging experts interviewed for reporting are slightly more convinced by Egorov's site but say neither identification is definitive. - India's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter is scheduled to image Egorov's proposed site in March, and Pinault's team is seeking follow-up re-imaging by LRO or future lunar orbiters. Summary: Both claims provide specific targets for renewed orbital imaging rather than conclusive recoveries of the lander. Chandrayaan-2 will revisit Egorov's candidate in March, and LRO or future missions may re-image the other candidate; definitive identification depends on those follow-up observations.