Lost Soviet Moon Lander May Have Been Found

Zeleniykot is a name I haven't heard in a while! From Russian it means "green cat", he used to write really good articles about spave on Habr, good job continuing the work!

Still baffles me how did Russian Empire/Soviets come from this to being a petty regional player who can barely take on a much weaker neighbor and being fully dependent on China.

The word "lost" is a little bit confusing in this context. It successfully landed and operated several days, but it's location was only approximated.

We've seen landers in recent years that crashed unintentionally in precise known locations. Does this mean that they were not lost?

Someday, someone, or some robot, will find it and ship it back, for museum display.

How come there's not more sattelites around the moon taking high resolution, high zoom photos to for example find this object? We can see beachball-sized objects on consumer-available photos (e.g. google maps/earth), and that's from over 100 km up through an atmosphere. I guess the answer is "nobody paid for it" but still.

There's google maps for the moon (https://www.google.com/maps/space/moon) but I'm not sure what resolution that is.

https://archive.is/pqiyD

'“One of them is wrong,” an expert said.'

missions to examine space craft that have been in space/moon for decades could be quite profitable, as these will provide engineering feedback as to what parts are still operable and how things failed and what might be done to effect repairs, as this is how aviation reached the level of reliability that it enjoys today, but with space bieng even less forgiving. We are getting lots of data about operations in LEO, and some from Mars, but the moon is tough, too much dust,no atmosphere, not enough gravity, and very wide temperiture/radiation swings that last for weeks,and actualy more difficult to build for than mars or leo.

@rainbolt