Lunar south pole landing dashboard
A landing dashboard for the Moon’s south pole.
Lunario is designed to compare sites and dates by sunlight, Earth visibility and communications, and space weather. Those windows are read against the real horizon, so mission planners, educators and the public can judge power and contact at a glance.
What Lunario does
- Pick a site and date
- Choose a spot near the south pole, an arrival time and a length of stay, and set how long a gap in sunlight or in the view of Earth the mission can accept.
- Read the real horizon
- Sun and Earth positions come from JPL Horizons and are checked against a horizon built from LOLA terrain, so crater rims and ridges block the view exactly where they rise.
- See the windows
- Hours of sunlight, hours of Earth in view, the longest gap in each, and the time when both are up together, across a timeline, a horizon chart and a south pole map.
- Shift the plan
- Move the arrival date and watch the windows change, then compare nearby sites and date shifts side by side, ranked by which ones meet the mission’s limits.
What Lunario takes into account
Lunario is designed to bring together the Moon’s terrain, Earth’s ground stations and the Sun’s behaviour, so a landing date can be judged on more than a single window.
The Moon
At the south pole the skyline is the terrain itself. A ridge a few kilometres away can hide the Sun or Earth for days, so the landscape has to be read together with the Moon’s motion.
- South-pole topography
- The horizon is built from LOLA elevation data, so crater rims and ridges block the sky where they actually rise.
- No atmosphere
- With no air, there is no refraction to lift the Sun or Earth above the limb.
- Libration, orbit and phase
- The Moon’s slight wobble, its place in orbit and its phase all change how the Sun and Earth sit against that horizon.
- Slopes and shadowed craters
- Steep ground and permanently shadowed crater floors matter for landing safety and for the ice those missions hope to find.
- Solar elevation and sunset
- How high the Sun stands, and how long until it drops behind the terrain, sets the power and thermal window.
- Surface temperature
- With nothing to hold heat, the surface swings from extreme cold in shadow to harsh heat in sunlight.
Earth
A direct-to-Earth link only works when Earth is above the local horizon, and when a Deep Space Network antenna can see the Moon.
- Earth in the sky
- Earth’s position, and when it sets behind the terrain, decides whether a lander can talk to Earth without a relay.
- Deep Space Network
- NASA’s DSN complexes at Goldstone in California, Madrid in Spain and Canberra in Australia take turns seeing the Moon as the Earth turns.
- Which station is in view
- At a given time, one or more of those complexes can see the Moon, and which antenna is available.
- Weather on the day
- Rain and other local weather can fade higher-frequency Ka-band links. For near dates, forecasts at each complex are taken into account.
- Future dates
- Further ahead, weather is a seasonal or climatological estimate, not a day-by-day forecast.
The Sun
The Sun supplies the power, and when it is active it also brings radio and radiation risk.
- Position and elevation
- Where the Sun sits above the terrain sets how much power solar arrays can generate and how hard the thermal environment is.
- Live flare alerts
- Lunario is designed to pull flare alerts from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and NASA’s DONKI, including the flare class (C, M or X), and to show flare-ups as a live feed.
- Effect on radio
- X-ray flares can cause high-frequency radio blackouts on the sunlit side of Earth, rated on NOAA’s R1 to R5 scale, and can interrupt links through the DSN.
- Radiation storms
- Solar radiation storms and energetic particles matter for crew and for electronics, both in transit and on the surface.
Why it matters
One week can decide a landing.
On the rim of Shackleton crater, a week-long stay from 5 December 2026 loses the Sun for almost four days and has Earth in view for less than an hour. Arrive on 12 December instead and the Sun and Earth stay above the horizon for the whole week.
| Arrival | Longest time without Sun | Earth in view |
|---|---|---|
| 5 Dec 2026 | Almost 4 days | Under 1 hour |
| 12 Dec 2026 | None | All week |
When a schedule slips, Lunario shows straight away whether the new date still works, or which nearby option does.
The challenge
Lunario is our entry for the 2026 NASA Space Apps challenge Lunar Landing Site Navigator. Missions to the Moon’s south pole face sharp swings in sunlight and Earth visibility: the Sun decides power and heat, and Earth’s place in the sky decides whether a lander can talk to Earth without a relay. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program and other missions headed for water ice need to compare sites and dates quickly, especially when a launch slips.
The data already exists in tools such as NASA’s Quickmap, Moon Trek and the JPL Horizons System, but those are built for detailed analysis rather than side-by-side comparison. The brief asked for an intuitive tool that shows the Sun and Earth against the real horizon, so planners, educators and the public can judge power and communication windows at a glance.
