Source: National Geographic, Breaking Orbit blog
It might not be in the stars for humans to return to the moon anytime soon.
But NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched last year in part to scout locations for a moon base, is proving that there’s still plenty it can do in the name of space exploration.
High-resolution LRO images have helped researchers track down the first successful robotic lunar rover, a U.S.S.R. craft known as Lunokhod 1.
The Soviet rover landed on the moon on November 17, 1970. The probe drove around for ten months, returning data on soil composition and lunar topography, before its signal was lost on September 14, 1971.
As can happen when you leave a broken vehicle roughly 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) from home, the exact location of Lunokhod 1 was lost to history.
Finding the rover wasn’t just an archaeological feat: Lunokhod 1 was carrying a reflector specifically designed to bounce back laser light beamed from Earth.
Knowing where to find the reflector will allow scientists today to aim lasers at the moon and get back precise readings on distance, lunar orientation, and tidal distortions.
Aside from adding proof that yes, in fact, we landed on the moon, accurate information from this laser ranging can in turn tell us about the moon’s interior composition and its long-term plans (our main satellite, btw, is slowly spiraling away from Earth at about 40 millimeters a year).
Combining laser data from several reflectors placed by the Apollo program and on Lunokhod 2 has been helping physicists study deviations in Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
(Related: “Einstein’s Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale.”)
That’s because lasers can measure the shape of the lunar orbit to within an accuracy of a millimeter, and GR predicts the lunar orbit to a similar degree of accuracy.
To continue reading: http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/breakingorbit/2010/04/long-lost-soviet-rover-found-o.html