Speaker
Description
The Artemis programme has committed to the lunar south pole, and NASA has identified nine candidate landing regions. These regions were selected against landing and short-mission criteria: Human Landing System constraints, astronaut line of sight, illumination across a mission window, and access to permanently shadowed regions. Recent work has ranked locations within them using GIS and multi-criteria methods, again for landing.
Permanent construction imposes different constraints. A lander needs a pad of tens of metres; a habitat needs contiguous ground at hectare scale, which changes the baseline at which slope and roughness must be assessed. Mission-window illumination is replaced by the longest continuous eclipse, which sets energy storage mass. Excavatability, shielding material availability and metre-scale hazard density become decisive. Global habitat-suitability studies address several of these factors, but favour the near-side maria and do not evaluate the polar regions to which the programme is actually committed.
This work asks how buildable the Artemis candidate regions are. Using existing datasets - LOLA and shape-from-shading topography, modelled illumination, Diviner thermal and rock-abundance products, and ShadowCam imagery of shadowed terrain - we define construction-oriented criteria, apply them to selected candidate regions, and measure the contiguous area that survives, with sensitivity testing of thresholds.
We present the framework, initial results, and an explicit comparison with published landing-suitability rankings, identifying where the two diverge. We also report which criteria, notably regolith depth and surface composition, cannot currently be constrained at the resolution polar terrain demands. The aim is to bring construction-engineering constraints into a site-selection discussion so far dominated by landing and science requirements.