About

Bringing space to life through creative solutions and immersive web experiences.

Our team

We are a team of six undergraduates from the University of Colombo and the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka.

Portrait of P.A.T.Kurera

P.A.T.Kurera

Team lead

Portrait of P M G H P Dasanayaka

P M G H P Dasanayaka

Portrait of G S H Perera

G S H Perera

Portrait of Lakdinu H.L.T.

Lakdinu H.L.T.

Portrait of N.S. Wickramanayaka

N.S. Wickramanayaka

Portrait of Fikry M N A

Fikry M N A

How we use NASA data

Every number MOONbound shows starts with NASA measurements. Here is what comes from NASA data, and what each piece drives in the tool.

hourly Sun and Earth positions, 2026 to 2031
43,825
landing sites, 38 pinpointed in LRO images
139
of skyline scanned at each site, up to 500 km out
360°
of the time a Deep Space Network station can see the Moon
98.4%
01

Where the Sun and Earth are

JPL DE440 ephemeris · NAIF SPICE

We turned JPL’s planetary ephemeris into an hourly table from 1 Jan 2026 to 1 Jan 2031. Each row says where the Sun and Earth appear from the Moon, corrected for light travel time, plus Earth’s tilt and rotation and the orientation of the star sphere.

Files and accuracy
  • de440.bsp planetary ephemeris
  • moon_pa_de440_200625.bpc lunar orientation
  • moon_de440_220930.tf Moon-fixed frame (MOON_ME)
  • pck00011.tpc planetary constants
  • naif0012.tls leap seconds
  • Agrees with an independent astronomy library to about 0.002°
  • Interpolating between hourly rows adds less than 0.0002°
  • Sunlight direction
  • Sunrise & sunset
  • Earth position & phase
  • Earth visibility
  • Eclipses
  • Star background
02

The shape of the ground

LRO laser altimeter (LOLA) · Cesium Moon Terrain

The 3D Moon is built from LRO’s laser altimeter. For every site we scan the terrain in 360 directions, up to 500 km out, to trace the skyline. That skyline decides when a ridge shadows the Sun or hides Earth.

Resolution and credit
  • About 59 m between 60°N and 60°S (LOLA merged with JAXA’s Kaguya terrain camera)
  • 60 m down to 5 m within 2.5° of each pole (LOLA polar data)
  • Terrain credit: NASA and the USGS Astrogeology Science Center
  • 3D Moon
  • Sunlit %
  • Power
  • Communication
03

139 places to land

LRO camera team (LROC) · NASA mission records

Of our 139 sites, 38 use positions the LRO camera team measured in orbital images: landers, rovers and impact craters, some found decades after the mission. The list also covers NASA’s nine Artemis candidate regions near the south pole.

NASA missions covered
  • Apollo, Surveyor, Ranger, Lunar Orbiter
  • Lunar Prospector, LCROSS, GRAIL, LADEE
  • CLPS deliveries and NASA instruments on them: PRIME-1, Lunar Vertex, VIPER, DIMPLE
  • Nine Artemis candidate landing regions
  • Site presets
  • Site comparison
04

What each site looks like

LRO, Apollo, Lunar Orbiter, Surveyor, Ranger · JPL Photojournal

Roughly 70–80 of our 107 site images are NASA’s: LRO camera and LOLA views, Apollo photography, early probe images and JPL Photojournal releases, all taken from Wikimedia Commons.

  • Site gallery
05

The Earth in the lunar sky

NASA Earth Observatory · Blue Marble Next Generation

The Earth you see above the horizon wears NASA’s Blue Marble base map at 21600 × 10800 pixels. It turns and changes phase to match the ephemeris.

  • Earth model
06

1.7 billion stars

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

The Milky Way backdrop is Deep Star Maps 2020, which plots about 1.7 billion stars from the Hipparcos-2, Tycho-2 and Gaia DR2 catalogues (Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC).

  • Star background
07

Who on Earth can hear you

NASA Deep Space Network · Handbook 810-005

We show NASA’s three DSN complexes (Goldstone, Madrid and Canberra) and which of them can see the Moon above a 10° elevation mask. Together they cover it about 98.4% of the time, with gaps of 1–2 hours.

  • Direct-to-Earth links
  • Coverage gaps
08

How much power sunlight gives

NASA SORCE mission · total solar irradiance

Solar power starts from the solar constant, 1361 W/m², as measured by SORCE. We scale it by the Sun’s real distance from the DE440 ephemeris.

  • Solar power

Partners and other data

NASA data is not the whole story. These agencies, datasets and tools fill in the rest.

JAXA
Kaguya terrain camera data merged into the mid-latitude terrain, the Kaguya-based south-pole illumination study behind our validation sites, and a Kaguya image.
ESA
Gaia DR2 and Hipparcos, inside the NASA star map and the HYG catalogue, and a SMART-1 image.
ISRO
Chandrayaan images. Chandrayaan-5 / LUPEX is also in the site list.
Clementine
Three images from the US Department of Defense and NASA mission.
HYG v4.1
David Nash’s star database (CC BY-SA 4.0) supplies the 41,487 individual stars down to magnitude 8.
NASA photos
Apollo 8, 11, 12 and 17 photography and an LRO view of the Apollo 11 site on the home and Lunar Landing pages, from the NASA Image and Video Library.
Other images
Company renderings, and photos of museum models and stamps.

Built with

  • Unreal Engine 5.8.4
  • Cesium for Unreal 2.31
  • Cesium ion
  • SpiceyPy
  • NumPy
  • Wikimedia Commons

Use of AI

Claude helped with planning, the Blueprint instructions, the Python scripts (ephemeris table, star field, site list) and the site descriptions.

A note on NASA

MOONbound is a NASA Space Apps Challenge project. NASA does not endorse it.

We make lunar landing smarter

Explore lunar terrain, visualize sunlight and Earth visibility, and discover better landing opportunities for future Moon missions.

Try Our App