When a Soviet rover went silent on the Moon in 1971, scientists assumed it was gone for good — but nearly forty years later, the reflector strapped to its back answered a laser pulse from Earth as if no time had passed at all

On November 17, 1970, a Soviet unmanned mission called Luna 17 landed on the Sea of Rains, a vast basalt plain on the near side of the Moon. The lander deployed a remote-controlled rover called Lunokhod 1, the first robotic vehicle ever to operate on the surface of another world. The rover was, by every [...] The post When a Soviet rover went silent on the Moon in 1971, scientists assumed it was gone for good — but nearly forty years later, the reflector strapped to its back answered a laser pul