NASA narrows selection of Moon landing sites for Artemis astronauts
This image shows nine candidate landing regions for NASA’s Artemis III mission, with each region containing multiple potential sites for the first crewed landing on the Moon in more than 50 years. The background image of the lunar South Pole terrain
A SpaceX Starship lander will land with the first people to walk on the Moon since 1972 within one of nine sites on the lunar South Pole during the Artemis 3 mission, NASA announced Tuesday.
The space agency first revealed the bigger group of potential landing areas in August 2022. Over the past two years, NASA’s Cross Agency Site Selection Analysis team successfully narrowed the original 13 landing candidates to nine locations.
To narrow down the candidate sites, a team of scientists and engineers used data from a NASA spacecraft currently flying around the Moon known as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), along with lunar science research.
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"The Moon’s South Pole is a completely different environment than where we landed during the Apollo missions," said NASA's Artemis lunar science lead Sarah Noble. "It offers access to some of the Moon’s oldest terrain, as well as cold, shadowed regions that may contain water and other compounds. Any of these landing regions will enable us to do amazing science and make new discoveries."
Teams considered several factors, including science potential, terrain, lighting and whether the landing trajectory would be compatible with NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, the Orion spacecraft and SpaceX’s Starship.
The lunar South Pole is an entirely unexplored area of the Moon by humans and contains places that are permanently in darkness.
NASA awarded SpaceX the first Artemis human landing system contact, during which the private company will land the first humans on the Moon since Apollo 17. Artemis 3 is expected to be a week-long mission to the South Pole.
The final landing site won't be determined until NASA selects its target launch dates for the Artemis III mission.