NASA Locates Lost Soviet Moon Rover

Along with bell bottoms, Nehru jackets and the pet rock craze, number another forgotten piece of 1970s history: a Soviet robotic rover that the Russians lost somewhere on the lunar surface.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of California San Diego has located the location of the unit on the moon.

The Lunokhod 1, the first successful robotic lunar rover, arrived on the moon's surface on November 17, 1970 carrying a laser reflecter. (A second rover was later also deployed.) It operated for about 10 months, sending back data from the soil as well as the topography. But the craft, which bounced signals back to the earth, was subsequently lost - with some speculating that it had perhaps fallen into a crater. The project officially ended in October, 1971.

More recently, however, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the region where where the missing reflector was thought to have been dropped off. Lasers were then pointed at the approximate location of the Lunokhod 1. The researchers said the craft gave off a stronger signal than anything they ever had previously received in years of studying its sister craft, allowing them to hone in on its location.

"The best signal we've seen from Lunokhod 2 in several years of effort is 750 return photons, but we got about 2,000 photons from Lunokhod 1 on our first try," said team leader Tom Murphy.