Fig. 5: A first approximate potential match between Luna 9’s camera view of the lunar surface and a 3D rendering of the site in which the YOLO-ETA machine learning model has made an identification of the spacecraft.
From: Possible identification of the Luna 9 Moon landing site using a novel machine learning algorithm
Top left: One of the first images transmitted by Luna 9 (image courtesy: NASA and RIA Novosti). Top Right: a contemporaneous Lockheed Electronics sketch interpreting the image; the Lockheed analysts posited the ‘spherical’ object toward the top left of the image (circled) to be part of the main spacecraft lander (image courtesy: NASA and Lockheed Electronics Company). Bottom: A QuickMap Tile Server we rendered of the site from LROC image M132071202LC (NASA/GSFC/ASU), was scaled and rotated to explore a tentative match of the terrain between the Luna 9 camera image and the LROC orthogonal view from orbit. Possible Luna 9 artefacts are labelled (a) through (e) as in Fig. 6. Assuming (c) may represent the Luna 9 lander, the largest artefact identified by the model at (a) could potentially be the flight module and align per the arrow to the spherical object posited by the Lockheed analysts.
