Introducing Artemis Mission Simulator - Attempting to simulate NASA's Artemis missions on moon before they actually go

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This post has been long time pending but now that repo is kind of “open-source ready”, I believe the time is right.

Note: If you don’t already know about NASA’s Artemis programme somehow, you need to check it out first here.

Introducing Artemis Mission Simulator :full_moon_face:!

This project is my open source attempt to simulate the whole of Artemis Missions using ROS 2 and (initially) Gazebo including Lunar Environment, recently announced Moonfall drones, LTVs, Rovers, and basically anything and everything that feels necessary for a high fidelity lunar base simulator.

Repository: GitHub - jasmeet0915/artemis_mission_simulator: Attempting to simulate NASA's Artemis missions on moon before they actually go using ROS 2 and Gazebo! 🌝 · GitHub

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The goal behind the project is 2 fold:

  • Fuel my interest in space robotics (and space in general), learn a lot of stuff and collaborate with amazing people working on the same.
  • Make this project as a potential plug-and-play playground for people working/researching on space robotics technologies primarily for the Artemis Missions.

Current Progress

Currently the project has a lunar_terrain_exporter CLI tool that pulls Lunar South Pole DEMs from NASA Planetary Geodesy Data Archive (PGDA) Product-78 to export Gazebo-ready SDF models for potential Artemis landing sites.

By default, the packages comes with generated SDF models for 4 potential landing sites as suggested by this study. These sites include:

  • Ridge between Shackleton and de Gerlache craters
  • Rim of de Gerlache crater
  • Isolated peak near Shackleton crater
  • Rim of Shackleton crater

With this, I have been pushing some scaffolding related changes recently including:

  • Devcontainer support
  • Basic buid and test github action workflows
  • Some refactoring

Now that most of that stuff is wrapped up, I am moving on to the more interesting stuff.

Future Plans

The initial focus of the project for the first milestone is simulate the Lunar Envrionment as closely to the real one as possible. I have divided this primarily into 3 parts:

Lunar Terrain (Package)

Completed by the lunar_terrain_exporter CLI using elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that is a part of the PGDA-78 as explained above.

Real Lunar Illumination Effects (Github Issue)

This would allow simulation of illumination conditions, permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) and would open up the simulation for potential simulations based on that such as solar power, line of sight communications with a simulated Earth etc. After a big brainstorming session with Claude, the plan currently is to use ephemeris data to get accurate relative positions of Sun and Earth w.r.t to the Moon and use that.

Better Texturing for Lunar Terrain (Github Issue)

As the name suggests, the goal is to have procedural texturing for the lunar terrain to make testing of VO and SLAM possible in the simulated environment in the coming future.

Following this milestone, the focus will shift toward simulation of lunar robotic assets including:

  • Moonfall drones
  • Lunar Terrain Vehicles (LTVs)
  • Rovers
  • Other Artemis surface systems

Looking for Feedback & Collaborators

I would love to hear feedback from the community especially the folks working with Space Robotics. I am tracking all the tasks and future plans with Github Issues and I’d be happy to chat with anyone interested in contributing or collaborating!

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