en.Wedoany.com Reported - NASA’s Artemis site selection team has completed the most detailed survey to date of the Moon’s south pole, identifying nine candidate landing regions where the first woman and the next man will set foot via the Starship human landing system this decade. The Moon’s surface area is about 14.6 million square miles, yet the locations humans hope to reach amount to a small patch of ground, covering an area smaller than a major metropolitan region.
The candidate list, located near the lunar south pole, includes the Mons Mouton Plateau, Mons Mouton, a peak near Cabeus B, de Gerlach Rim 2, Haworth, Malapert Massif, two regions on Nobile Rim, and Slater Plain. These regions were selected because sunlight, water, and line-of-sight radio—three elements that can sometimes coexist on the same patch of lunar soil at the south pole—are almost nowhere else available simultaneously on the Moon.
At the south pole, the Sun never rises far above the horizon, and shadows stretch for kilometers. Temperatures inside permanently shadowed regions hover around minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to trap and preserve water ice delivered by ancient comet impacts. NASA wants astronauts close enough to walk to this ice while standing in sunlight that can charge their solar panels, but the geometry allowing both is extremely rare.
NASA’s updated list of nine candidate regions for the Artemis III crewed landing, released in October 2024, was narrowed down from 13 regions identified in 2022. Each region is roughly 15 kilometers on a side, with an actual landing ellipse about 100 meters in diameter. Shackleton Crater, adjacent to the de Gerlach Rim 2 candidate region, is about 21 kilometers in diameter and 4 kilometers deep; its floor is one of the coldest measured locations in the solar system, while its rim receives nearly continuous sunlight. Malapert Massif, about 5 kilometers high, is bathed in near-permanent daylight. The Mons Mouton Plateau is the largest of the nine candidate regions, with an area that dwarfs the other eight. The ridge connecting Shackleton and de Gerlach has been separately identified by NASA as a focal point for the long-term lunar base plan announced earlier this year.
NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) was originally planned to drive into shadowed regions to survey ice quantities, but the agency canceled the mission in July 2024. Observations from the 2009 LCROSS impact and the 2020 SOFIA telescope have confirmed water molecules in lunar soil, but no one knows the exact reserves. If ice is scattered, the economics of a lunar base will change, further narrowing the site selection.
The Apollo program achieved six crewed landings between 1969 and 1972, all in the equatorial belt. None of the Apollo landing sites are suitable for Artemis because they lack water ice and permanent sunlight. The far side cannot maintain direct line-of-sight communication with Earth, and the north pole appears to have less water. What remains is a thin ring around the south pole, where a few ridges and peaks meet all constraints simultaneously.
Images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show that the south pole landscape resembles a battlefield of rocks rather than rolling gray plains. Slopes of 10 to 20 degrees are common, and shadows are absolute. As astronauts move from sunlit ridges into shadowed craters, temperatures will plummet from about 130 degrees Fahrenheit to below minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Firefly Aerospace has been awarded a contract to deploy drones into permanently shadowed regions to survey routes before crewed missions.
NASA’s long-term plan calls for an investment of about $20 billion in supporting infrastructure, including pressurized rovers, surface habitats, and nuclear fission reactors. A 40-kilowatt fission surface power system is being developed with Westinghouse and other contractors. Three new missions announced this year aim to deliver the first hardware by the end of this decade.
The candidate list is a planning number, not a final answer. Artemis III funds one landing, and each mission requires selecting a single landing site based on the latest lighting models, ice surveys, and Starship variants. The Mons Mouton Plateau draws attention for its vast size, while sites near de Gerlach Rim offer longer cumulative sunlight periods and walking distance to the permanently shadowed interior of Shackleton. China has named south pole candidate sites near Shackleton for its Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8 missions, with some locations close to areas still under U.S. consideration, but no treaty currently resolves who arrives first or what that means.
Whoever first lands on one of these polar ridges will stand on hundreds of meters of lunar soil that will anchor the rest of the Moon program for the 21st century. In the permanent shadows deep inside Shackleton, there may be enough water to make the entire exploration endeavor realistic.
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