Scientists may be nearing the long-lost landing site of the Soviet Union’s Luna 9, the first man-made object to safely land on the moon.
February 3, 1966 Luna 9 It descended to Oceanus Procellarum, on the western edge of the moon’s Earth side, and transmitted the first images taken from the surface of another celestial body. At that time, scientists were still discovering the surface month It may be too soft to support landers and future astronauts. The images sent back by Luna 9 revealed solid ground, helped answer questions, and paved the way for future missions.
But 60 years later, the probe’s exact resting place is remain uncertain. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has mapped nearly the entire Moon in incredible detail since 2009. But Luna 9 is small, about the size of a beach ball, making it difficult to distinguish it from the rocks and shadows that dot the moon’s surface.
Now, two independent research teams say they may have narrowed down the spacecraft’s location.
One team’s proposed site is within about 3 miles (5 kilometers) of the official landing coordinates for the Soviet mission. The other is about 25 km (15 miles) away. But they are official coordinates It was based on estimating the spacecraft’s position by measuring the direction of radio signals from antennas on Earth, which was itself inaccurate. This technique placed Luna 9 somewhere within a search radius approximately 60 miles (100 km) in diameter.
Researchers say images from India will be released in the future. Chandrayaan-2 The orbiter, scheduled to fly over the region in March and equipped with a camera that can provide a clearer view of the lunar surface than LRO, could help determine which position is correct.
“We think that on the overpass, the cameras will be a little bit better, capturing more images at two to four times the resolution, and really giving us a definitive view of the site,” Luis Pinault, a researcher at University College London/Birkbeck Center for Planetary Science who led one of the recent efforts, told Space.com.
Revisiting a 60-year-old mystery
Luna 9’s arrival on the moon was very different from modern moon landings. As it neared the surface, a spherical capsule encased in inflatable cushioning material was ejected from the spacecraft, bouncing several times before coming to rest. Like a metal flower, four petal-like panels were deployed for added stability, and a heavier descent stage crashed nearby.
This unusual landing sequence may have scattered multiple pieces of hardware in a small area, and researchers are now trying to identify them from lunar orbit.
One potential landing site was identified by Vitaly Egorov, a science communicator who runs a blog. Zeleny Kot He has been trying to track down Luna 9 for years. He recently resumed his search as a civilian. Crowdsourcing initiativesby raising funds and live-streaming the process, so volunteers can help examine images in orbit to find tiny anomalous pixels that could be traces of the lander.
He used LROC QuickMap, a Google Street View-like interface for LRO imagery, to compare the orbital data with Luna 9’s original surface panorama from 1966. By juxtaposing distant hills, rocks and distinct ejecta patterns seen in both datasets, Zelenykot said they narrowed it down to a possible site about 15 miles (25 kilometers) away from the reported Soviet-era coordinates. blog post It was released on February 7th.
Around the same time, Pinault’s team approached the mystery using the following method: artificial intelligence.
in paper In a paper published in the journal NPJ Space Exploration on January 21, the research team reported a series of features near the historically reported landing area that may correspond to Luna 9 and hardware jettisoned during its descent.
Rather than manually scanning millions of images, the researchers used the following LRO images to train a machine learning model. apollo A landing site where the location of spacecraft hardware is well documented. To test the system, they fed it images that had never been seen before. Apollo 17 Sites photographed under different lighting and viewing angles. The model successfully detected and located Apollo 17’s descent phase and also uniquely identified Luna 16’s landing site in previously unanalyzed LRO images, the study said.
The researchers then tasked the system with analyzing images near Luna 9’s probable landing area. The algorithm flagged a major object approximately 3 miles (5 km) away from the reported coordinates, and several smaller nearby features less than 650 feet (200 meters) away.
The same features were detected under different lighting conditions. This is a strong indication that the system is separating real structures rather than shadows or lighting artifacts, the study noted.
“This machine doesn’t get tired, right?” Pinault said. space dot com In a recent interview. “You can look at a lot of images and just stop and say, ‘This is different.'”
“If humans had been paying attention, we think it’s likely that the smaller artifacts would have been completely missed,” he added.
The model may be detecting subtle combinations of regolith disturbances, unfolding shapes, and shadow signatures that human observers may not consciously notice, Pinault said. “Machines are making correlations, but they don’t fully understand them, at least for now.”
An increasingly crowded month
The team acknowledges that the model was originally designed for identification. micrometeorite The photos produced false positives, including at least one instance where the suspected “hardware” turned out to be stone. But rather than risk missing subtle evidence, the researchers purposely tuned the system to flag promising candidates for human review, the study notes.
Both teams now hope that Chandrayaan 2’s cameras will be able to resolve Luna 9’s capsule sharp enough to discern the petal-like panels.
“If new images reveal that shape, I’ll hold up my hand and say, ‘Either someone dropped a cardboard cutout to fool us, or it’s a great artifact of human space exploration history,'” Pinault said.
NASA’s future plans artemis 2 However, the mission doesn’t seem to be useful.
Artemis 2 will perform a high-speed slingshot orbit around the moon before returning to Earth. At their closest approach, the four astronauts aboard the mission’s Orion spacecraft will fly about 3,700 to 4,300 miles (6,000 to 7,000 kilometers) above the lunar surface, much higher than the hundreds of kilometers orbited by LRO and Chandrayaan 2.
Even if Oceanus Procellarum were to rotate into view (which Pinault called “lucky”), Artemis 2 would be too far away to resolve an object as small as Luna 9.
In the long term, the AI-assisted search for Luna 9 offers a glimpse of how artificial intelligence could help monitor a moon increasingly filled with artifacts in the coming decades, Pinault said.
with NASA artemis program and china’s plan Due to its long-term presence on the lunar surface and the increasing number of commercial missions headed to the moon around the world, the lunar surface is accumulating more hardware than ever before. AI systems like the one used by Pinault’s team will eventually be able to work directly on the spacecraft to identify lunar assets, help catalog and track surface equipment, and monitor conditions in near real time. rocket Exhaust gases and shocks disturb regolith particles the size of lunar dust.
“There’s good science here,” Pineau said.