This gismo looks like it ’d accrue asunder trundle over a particularly harsh bit of carpeting , but it ’s actually much more durable than it seems . It ’s Lunokhod 1 and the Soviets repulse it around the moon in 1970 .
Lunokhod 1 was abandoned after it ran out of big businessman up there , and the Russian space party boss did n’t have a precise book of its coordinates — so it ’s remain lost for 40 years .
However , astrophysicist Tom Murphy has track down the lunar clunker , thanks to NASA ’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographing other Soviet space waste on the Sun Myung Moon ’s surface and giving him a skillful estimation of where to look . Tom point a optical maser pulse in its focussing — confirming it ’s emplacement thanks to the bounced - back photons break up up by the Apache Point Observatory .
Now we have a precise decimal point on the moonlight to aim at , it opens the doors to all sorts of science involving gravity , planetary wobble and the Sun Myung Moon ’s course through space . [ SpectrumBoing Boing ]
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