LASTLIGHT: land where the light lasts
At the lunar south pole the Sun skims the horizon. One ridge in the wrong place and a lander goes dark: Athena (IM-2) landed at Mons Mouton on 6 March 2025 and went silent in under 13 hours.
LASTLIGHT answers one question before launch: if a lander aims at this site on this day, what is the chance it still has power after 14 days?
- Terrain: NASA LRO LOLA. Sun and Earth: NASA/JPL NAIF SPICE ephemerides, every hour of 2027–2030.
- The nine NASA Artemis III candidate regions; 1,000 simulated landings per day with landing error, slope and tip-over; 13,023,000 landings in all.
- Best day found: Malapert Massif, 15 October 2029, 96.4% of landers survive 14 days. Only Malapert reaches 95% with this generic lander.
- Sun and Earth angles agree with NASA JPL Horizons to 0.004°. No machine learning; every number comes from the pipeline’s files.
Made in Casablanca by Adam, Ghali and Yassine, team Casablanca, We Have A Solution, for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026. This site needs JavaScript for its 3D views.
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