NASA's Artemis 2 mission launched on April 1 on a historic mission that will see a crew of four astronauts journey to the far side of the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 returned to Earth in December 1972.

The efforts of Artemis 2 crewmembers Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will test technologies vital to the success of the Artemis 4 moon landing, which is currently slated to launch in 2028. But where will NASA's first mission to the moon's surface in over five decades touch down, and will the landing site be visible from Earth?

NASA has identified nine potential landing zones for the Artemis program that target the region surrounding the south lunar pole, as opposed to the sites chosen by the Apollo-era missions that were spread across the moon's equator. Here's how to spot the region on your own.

Where could Artemis 4 land on the moon?

NASA's potential Artemis landing sites, which include crater rims, plains and in some cases raised peaks that tower over the moonscape below, were picked for their scientific potential and accessibility, while also taking into account the future crew's ability to communicate with Earth once on the ground.

NASA has revealed 9 candidate landing sites for future Artemis missions. (Image credit: NASA)

"It offers access to some of the moon's oldest terrain, as well as cold, shadowed regions that may contain water and other compounds," Artemis lunar science lead Sarah Noble said in a 2024 press release. "Any of these landing regions will enable us to do amazing science and make new discoveries."

Will the Artemis landing sites be visible from Earth?

The moon is tidally locked to Earth, which means that it takes almost exactly as long to complete a full rotation as it does to complete an orbit of our Blue Marble. As a result, we only ever see the same familiar face of our natural satellite.

However, a slight incline in its axis relative to Earth causes the moon to wobble slightly as it makes its way around our planet, allowing us to see slightly more than 50% of its surface. This gentle wobble, known as libration, dictates the extent of the moon's south polar region that can be seen from Earth at any one time.

Even with favorable lunar libration, the extreme southerly latitude of the Artemis 4 landing sites means that we won't get a clear view of them from Earth. However, if you know where to look, you may just catch a glimpse of the region that seems destined to play host to humanity's first permanent moonbase.

Where is the lunar south pole?

Finding the lunar south pole isn't always as simple as you would think, partially due to the fact that its orientation relative to the horizon is dependent on your latitude on Earth, according to the Planetary Society. In other words, the moon's north pole isn't always pointing directly "up" in the night sky.

During the waxing and waning phases surrounding a full moon, viewers in the northern hemisphere can find their way to the south polar region by identifying the line separating night from day, known as the terminator, and following it down to its lowest point.

Now that you've found the moon's southerly latitudes, you can look out for specific geographical features to help you narrow in on the landing zones using a telescope with an aperture of 6 inches or more. Note that this is best attempted in the week surrounding the monthly full moon phase, when the majority of the lunar disk is illuminated by sunlight.

 

First, locate the 53-mile-wide (85-kilometer-wide) Tycho Crater. This prominent impact site dominates the southern hemisphere around the full moon phase by dint of its youthful brightness, towering central peak and vast network of "ejecta rays" — reflective streaks of debris that were thrown outward during its creation.

Next, trace an imaginary line south until you find the sprawling form of Clavius — one of the oldest and largest craters on the moon, which served as the location for the lunar base in the Stanley Kubrick movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." Clavius can be recognized by dint of an arcing line of impact craters nestled within its 143-mile (230 km) expanse, along with the Porter and Rutherford impact sites, which overlap part of its northeastern and southeastern rim.

How to find the lunar south pole using the terminator and prominent craters. (Image credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, edits made by Anthony Wood in Canva)

 

Our next step is the Moretus Crater, which is located close to the south polar region to the lower right of Clavius. Moretus, like Tycho, is recognizable by its prominent central peak, which rose as the crater floor rebounded inwards in the wake of the devastating asteroid strike that heralded its creation.

The Artemis 4 candidate landing sites are grouped around the south pole below Moretus at the extreme edge of the lunar disk, though only a glimpse of the most northerly sites such as Nobel Crater and Malapert Massif can be spotted when lunar libration is favorable.

What about during the full moon phase?

Of course, Artemis 2 launched on the night of a full moon — a time when the lunar disk is fully-lit by the sun, with no helpful shadows to guide us. During this phase, we can find our way to the south lunar pole with the help of two young, bright craters — Tycho and Copernicus.

First, find Copernicus shining brightly 10 degrees above the lunar equator, brightening the dark basaltic plains on the western lunar surface, and Tycho, which dominates the southern hemisphere of Earth's natural satellite around the full moon phase. Both will be surrounded by streaks of bright, reflective material that were cast out during the violent asteroid impacts that formed the craters.

 

Next, draw an imaginary line from the western rim of Copernicus Crater through the right of Tycho, when you reach the edge of the moon, you will have found the general location of the lunar south pole.

Want to find out more about the Artemis program? Then be sure to read our detailed explainer article on NASA's efforts to return humans to the moon and to stay tuned to our Artemis 2 live blog for regular updates on the first crewed mission to lunar space this century.

Quelle: SC

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Next-gen astronaut Moon rovers aim for deployment ahead of Artemis 4 crew arrival

Artists’ renderings of lunar terrain vehicles selected for development to support NASA’s Moon Base program. Astrolab’s Crewed Lunar Vehicle (left) and Lunar Outpost’s Pegasus (right). Illustration: Astrolab/Lunar Outpost

NASA’s goal of a sprawling Moon Base near the south pole of the Moon will be driven in part by its ability to move astronauts from one location to another. Right now, two companies are racing to give the agency that capability by the end of 2027.

Last month, NASA selected Astrolab and Lunar Outpost to develop lunar terrain vehicles that can be delivered to the agency next year. They are two out of the three companies who were originally competing for the LTV contract announced by NASA in 2024, which would’ve resulted in the selection of just one rover.

Instead, NASA asked the companies to come up with a simpler design that doesn’t need to potentially survive on the lunar surface for a decade, but rather something that could be ready in time for the first crewed landing of the Artemis program, which is currently scheduled for early 2028.

 

“Protecting for [plume surface interaction], we plan to keep the LTVs approximately 2 km away when the landers land,” said Ryan Stephan, NASA’s acting director for cargo landers. “They’ll traverse in, be able to pick up the crew, and then do missions up to like 10 km during the crewed period and then uncrewed, like Carlos said, a total of 400 km throughout the lifetime.”

Astrobotic’s offering is called the Crewed Lunar Vehicle (CLV-1) and takes learnings from the company’s future-looking Flexible Logistics & Exploration (FLEX) rover, capable of carrying humans and cargo, along with its smaller FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) rover.

“FLIP was always going to be a test bed for LTV, that’s why FLIP has extremely large tires because they were meant to be the LTV tires and big overpowered wheel actuators and large batteries,” Jaret Matthews, Astrolab’s CEO and founder, told Spaceflight Now following NASA’s May 26 Moon Base event.

“We’ve already obviously made a lot of progress there, and that is directly transferable to CLV. So it’s hard to say as a percentage-wise, how much work is ahead of us. There’s still a lot of work ahead of us for sure, but we have a great foundation off which to build.”

The FLIP rover is scheduled to fly onboard Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 mission, which will carry FLIP and other payloads to the Moon later this year. Both the lander and the FLIP rover are going through final environmental testing before they meet up at the Kennedy Space Center to be integrated together and prepared for launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

Similarly, Lunar Outpost took lessons learned from developing its larger Eagle LTV and its smaller series of robotic rovers, like the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP). The company flew one of its MAPP rovers on Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission in 2025 and will so again on the upcoming IM-3 mission as well as alongside astronauts on a future Artemis mission.

“So it’s the part of the Artemis Deployed Instruments Program. So much like in Apollo, where the astronauts deployed various instrument packages and suites during their mission,” said Andrew ‘AJ’ Gemer, Lunar Outpost’s co-founder and chief financial officer. “What’s really cool about, you know, our mission is it’ll be the first time that we have human-robot interaction that our astronaut crews will actually have a rover companion there on the lunar surface to help them out and help keep them safe.”

Gemer said Lunar Outpost already has a pair of static human-in-the-loop mockups of its Pegasus LTV and the team is progressing towards more developed versions.

“We’re going to continue that and extend it into full scale drivable prototypes that will eventually be used as astronaut trainers. They’ll be driving these vehicles in a representative lunar environment here on Earth, along with our digital twins and simulations that accurately represent the vehicle dynamics in the lunar environment and under lunar gravity,” Gemer said.

“And parallel to all of this, we’ll be building and qualifying the flight hardware. So going through our standard lunar mobility qualification processes, all arriving at a successful delivery to NASA in November of 2027.”

Matthews said one of the critical challenges that these landers and rovers need to overcome is the ability to survive the harsh cold that comes with being in total darkness on the Moon, which can be around negative 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The company’s FLIP rover is designed to survive for 100 hours of lunar night conditions and the CLV-1 is slated for 150 days of darkness.

“In both cases, our approach is to essentially have a lot of onboard energy storage, so a lot of battery capacity, and use that capacity to keep things just warm enough while hibernating through the night. And the second tactic we use is to turn down our radiator,” Matthews said.

“We have a radiator that rejects heat from the avionics in the daytime, but if you just let the radiator continue to radiate throughout the night, you’re going to lose a lot of heat. So our approach is to actually cover up the radiator with our solar arrays. We’re doing this both on FLIP and on CLV to limit the amount of radiation we have throughout the night.”

The New Glenn-sized elephant in the room

While both companies continue to make progress on their new LTV designs, a big potential hurdle exists in their ability to reach the Moon.

In the original competition for the LTV contract, the companies (Astrolab, Intuitive Machines, and Lunar Outpost) were required to procure their own path to land on the Moon. Astrolab and Lunar Outpost selected SpaceX’s Starship as their ride and Intuitive Machines chose its own Nova-D lander.

However, in this new procurement, NASA decided that it would take the reins on securing the launch and landing side of the equation and selected Blue Origin to do both. It would launch the LTVs on top of its Blue Moon Mark 1, flying on a New Glenn rocket.

The May 28 explosion of the New Glenn intended to fly the NG-4 mission destroyed Blue Origin’s only operational launch pad and put their launch schedule on ice. The company’s CEO, Dave Limp, said during the VivaTech conference last week, that the company aims to resume launching New Glenn rockets from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida by the end of the year.

Limp added that the first launch of a Blue Moon Mk.1 cargo lander, previously planned to launch later this summer, would instead fly in early 2027. The lander relies on New Glenn because its the only rocket that flies with a seven-meter-diameter payload fairing and it can provide fuel to the lander at the pad.

In an interview with Spaceflight Now earlier this month, Carlos García-Galán, the Program Executive for NASA’s Moon Base program, said avoiding anomalies like this is part of why NASA ultimately wants the landers and payloads flying for Moon Base missions to become agnostic of launch vehicles.

“This anomaly was kind of a wake-up call to the fact why it’s so important that we achieve this vision of operations. And on New Glenn specifically, the team is definitely focused on, number one, understanding what happened, rebuilding the infrastructure, and get back to nominal operations,” García-Galán said.

“We will be in the process of doing that in parallel. We’ll be looking at different options for Moon Base and Artemis on how we can continue our mission without significant delays.”

Quelle: SN