For almost four decades, a 1,650-pound Soviet rover was completely unmarked on the Moon somewhere in Mare Imbrium. Not destroyed, not buried, but lost, in the most literal sense. No one could tell where it was, and for decades, no one could prove it still worked. The true history of Lunokhod 1, the Soviet Union's 8-wheeled lunar rover, is a more bizarre story than any other space hardware of the Cold War era. Murphy et al.'s 2010 study titled “Laser ranging to the lost Lunokhod 1 reflector,” published in the journal Icarus, reported the rover's complete disappearance from tracking, meaning scientists' guesses for where the rover should be were off by almost five kilometers, the distance of which made the act of “finding” the rover seem more like luck than science.
A rover built for a summer road trip that refused to stop
