The layers of each digital world.

Terrain is a digital elevation model of the whole surface. Operators plan landings and traverses on it, and landers navigate by it.

Method

Each place takes its heights from the finest elevation model that covers it. A stereo model's heights are used only where its confidence map marks them reliable. Every tile keeps the Moon's curvature.

Check

Every tile's heights are compared with its sources at random points. Its mean error and its spread must stay within tolerance. Where a tile fails, the map shows its coarser parent tile instead.

Sample

The 2 m stereo model from the LRO Camera (LROC) at the Apollo 11 site, in 1 m contours on a 500 m grid. East of the dashed line, where that model ends, the 59 m SLDEM2015 model in 5 m contours.

Formats

3D Tiles 1.1, a standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

(LROC; LROC on confidence maps; Henriksen et al. 2017; NASA Goddard; OGC 3D Tiles)

Imagery is the surface as cameras in orbit see it, with each pixel placed on the ground. It shows surface detail such as boulders, fresh craters, and the hardware that past missions left behind.

Method

The whole Moon is the Wide Angle Camera mosaic from LRO, draped on the terrain as image tiles. Each site adds Narrow Angle Camera orthophotos at up to 50 cm. Each photo is placed by its archive label and matched in brightness to the whole-Moon map.

Check

Every tile must lie within one pixel of its source, measured on the ground. Each site photo must match the map's brightness within 5 percent.

Sample

The Apollo 11 descent stage at the center of a 600 m square, at the coordinates LROC publishes for it. The photo is the Narrow Angle Camera orthophoto of observation M150361817.

Formats

Image tiles in the OGC WorldCRS84Quad tile matrix set

(LROC; Henriksen et al. 2017)

Light is where and when sunlight reaches the ground. It drives solar power and surface heat, and it sets what cameras can see. Near the poles it changes by the hour.

Method

For each point, Semaphore computes the horizon in every degree of azimuth on the curved Moon. Illumination at any instant then follows from the Sun's direction in NASA's planetary ephemeris.

Check

The horizons match an independent search to within two millionths of a degree. Every point in NASA's permanent shadow map stays dark, and average illumination agrees with NASA's published map.

Sample

One instant, computed for this sample from the 2 m model: 2026-05-22T08:00:00Z, with the Sun 2.6 degrees above the eastern horizon. East of the dashed line, where the 2 m model ends, the sample draws no light.

Formats

GeoTIFF, one band per degree of azimuth

(LROC; NASA Goddard on polar shadow; Mazarico et al. 2011; Park et al. 2021)

Places are the official feature names, with the location and size of each feature. They give people and software one agreed name for each feature.

Method

Every name the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has approved, from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Gazetteer, and NASA's nine candidate regions for a crewed landing. Each place records its center, its size, and the origin of its name.

Check

Each named crater is compared with the Robbins crater database, an independent catalog, and every mismatch is listed.

Sample

IAU names at the south pole, at the Gazetteer's center points, over the Diviner temperature map.

Formats

Searchable records, and labels as vector tiles in a PMTiles archive

(USGS Gazetteer; USGS on landing regions; Robbins 2019; Williams et al. 2019)

Temperature decides whether hardware and ice survive on the ground. Near the south pole, summer maximums range from 45 kelvin (K) on shadowed crater floors to over 300 K on sunlit slopes.

Source

Maps from the team of the Diviner radiometer on LRO. Each 240 m cell holds its highest bolometric temperature in summer, from nearly a decade of measurements.

Sample

Summer maximum temperature, black at 40 K to white at 340 K, with the 110 K line drawn.

(Williams et al. 2019)

Resources are materials that missions can take from the ground instead of launching them from Earth. For example, water ice can supply drinking water and rocket propellant, and the regolith, the loose surface soil, can yield oxygen. This layer shows where each resource is likely to be found.

Source

The Diviner team's maps of cold traps and of the depth to stable ice. A cold trap stays below 110 K in summer, cold enough to hold water ice for a billion years. The area where ice is stable doubles at 2 cm below the surface.

Sample

Where water ice can survive at the south pole. Cyan marks the cold traps, 13,029 km² poleward of 80°S, which matches the 1.30 × 10⁴ km² the Diviner team reports. Grey shows the depth to stable ice, lighter where the ice is shallower and black where no ice is stable.

(NASA on resources; NASA Johnson; Williams et al. 2019; Schorghofer and Williams 2020)

Gravity is uneven. Dense masses called mascons lie under the maria, the dark lava plains. They pull most low orbits down. Missions spend fuel to hold their orbits, or fly in the few that stay stable without it.

Source

GRGM900C, the gravity field NASA Goddard solved from the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. The sample shows its free-air anomaly to degree 600, at a radius of 1,738 km.

Sample

Free-air gravity over the eastern nearside maria, bright for excess mass and dark for deficit, with contours every 50 milligals. The field correlates at 0.99 with an independent solution of the same GRAIL data from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

(NASA PDS; Lemoine et al. 2014; Konopliv et al. 2014; NASA Ames on orbits)

Beyond Earth's magnetic field, radiation has two main sources. Galactic cosmic rays arrive all the time, and the Sun adds bursts of energetic particles. Radiation limits how long crews can stay, and it can upset and degrade electronics.

Source

Good events counted each second by the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) on LRO. Solar particle events from NASA's Space Weather Database Of Notifications, Knowledge, Information (DONKI).

Sample

CRaTER's daily rate in 2024, from one sample an hour. Quiet days run about 32 events per second, and the highest hourly sample reached 10,638 per second on 2024-06-08. All 15 days with the highest rates fall within a day of a solar particle event in DONKI.

(NASA PDS; NASA DONKI)

Assets are the spacecraft, landers, and rovers that operators publish, with their positions, paths, and plans.

Source

Operators publish them as standard orbit messages, defined by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS). Public archives supply the paths of missions that share them.

Sample

LRO on a real pass, from its reconstructed ephemeris in NASA's archive. It passes 3.9 km east of the site at 65.9 km altitude, 1.60 km/s over the ground.

(CCSDS; NASA JPL)

Hazards are the boundaries operators are asked to respect, and the rule behind each one. They help missions stay clear of each other and of protected heritage sites.

Source

Heritage boundaries from NASA's 2011 recommendations, and the safety zones that signatory nations declare under the Artemis Accords.

Sample

Both boundaries at Tranquility Base, with the site's IAU name. NASA recommends that rovers stay 75 m from the Apollo 11 descent stage. Landing spacecraft should stay outside 2.0 km and not fly over the site.

(NASA; NASA on the Artemis Accords)