Russian Lunar rover found after 37 years
A missing Soviet Lunar rover has been discovered using images of the Moon released by NASA this month.
Phil Stooke, from the University of Western Ontario, used the data to track down Lunokhod 2, which landed on big rock in 1973.
The rover took TV images of the surrounding area and travelled about 23 miles over the surface while exploring.
The journey was the longest any robotic rover has ever been driven on another celestial body.
So Lunokhod did a pretty good job before it went kaput around four months after it landed when it drove into a crater and got its radiator jammed with soil.
But where it finally came to a stop has been unknown until now.
Phil had a close look at the latest batch of images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
He was able to spot the tracks left by the rover and, hey presto, where these tracks stop mark its final destination.
Click on the pic to embiggen.
Weird Science Factoid: It would take 15,840,000 rolls of wallpaper to cover the Great Wall of China. But how much paste would you need?
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
