Scientists believe they have found the landing site of Luna 9, the first human-made object to successfully touch down on the Moon.
The mission was a historic breakthrough in space exploration, proving that a spacecraft could land on the lunar surface and send data back to Earth.
Now, 60 years after Luna 9’s pioneering journey and decades of detailed mapping, teams of researchers believe they may have found the craft’s final resting place.
Luna 9 was part of the Soviet Union’s Ye-6 programme, a series marked by repeated failure.
Eleven earlier attempts ended in disaster, brought down by rocket malfunctions and guidance errors.
Success came only on the 12th try, when the spacecraft landed in Oceanus Procellarum — the Ocean of Storms — a vast plain on the Moon’s near side.
The landing itself was highly unconventional. Rather than touching down on legs, the probe fired a braking engine and ejected a spherical capsule from several metres above the surface.
Encased in inflatable shock absorbers, it bounced across the Moon like a beach ball before settling and opening four petal-like panels to stabilise itself. The rest of the spacecraft crashed nearby.
Only the 100-kilogram sphere survived to operate on the surface. Powered by batteries, it functioned for just three days, but in that brief time it sent back three panoramic images and vital scientific data.
Most importantly, it proved that the Moon’s surface was solid — dispelling fears that landers might sink into deep dust.
At the time, the Soviet newspaper Pravda published the probe’s landing coordinates. But the precision of such measurements in the 1960s was limited.
A serious effort to verify those coordinates began in 2009, when high-resolution cameras aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter started returning images capable of spotting objects just half a metre across.
Planetary scientist Jeff Plescia, from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, searched the images for signs of Soviet landers, hoping to see a blast mark left by Luna 9’s descent engine. Despite later successes in identifying other sites, Luna 9 remained missing.
The search gathered momentum in 2018, led by Vitaly Egorov, a former aerospace engineer and science writer. Having previously identified the Mars 3 lander in orbital images of Mars, he turned his attention back to the Moon.
The task proved far harder. The likely landing zone was vast, and the available images less detailed. Early attempts failed.
By 2025, Egorov revived the effort, enlisting volunteers online and using triangulation techniques.
By matching features seen in Luna 9’s original panoramic photographs — distant hills, boulders and ejecta streaks — with modern topographic data, he calculated a new set of coordinates, around 25 kilometres from the officially reported site.
Those coordinates have now been passed to Indian scientists, who plan to image the area with high-resolution cameras from India’s Chandrayaan-2 lunar misison. In theory, the images could be sharp enough to reveal the lander’s distinctive shape.
Meanwhile, a separate team led by Lewis Pinault at University College London is approaching the mystery from another angle.
The researchers have adapted a machine-learning algorithm, originally designed to spot micrometeoroids, to search for human-made objects on the Moon.
Trained on images of Apollo sites, the system successfully identified other Soviet landing locations and highlighted several possible candidates near Luna 9’s reported coordinates. Even so, the scientists stress that human judgement and new imagery remain essential.
For researchers, the search is about more than historical curiosity. Studying long-abandoned spacecraft could reveal how materials degrade after decades of exposure to the harsh lunar environment.
Scientists now hope that the little sphere that bounced across the Moon in 1966 may finally be found.
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