Cesium Moon Terrain, the first readily accessible, comprehensive 3D tileset of the Moon, is now available. This innovative tileset is composed of precise terrain and imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) programme and other sources, and is provided as 3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium Community Standard created by Cesium. Besides offering digital twin solutions for our own planet, this technology demonstrates its applicability for extraterrestrial landscapes as well.
Cesium Moon Terrain was recently featured at the Digital Twin for Lunar Development Workshop held at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This workshop united the space enterprise community to advance digital twins for NASA and develop an open, interoperable platform for a lunar digital ecosystem.
“We launched Cesium Moon Terrain as an accurate and interoperable 3D Tiles canvas to support the international interest in lunar exploration and building structures on the moon’s surface,” Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi stated. “Cesium Moon Terrain will enable engineers, system integrators, and digital content creators to build simulations, mission plans, and real-time operations experiences.”
Understanding challenging Lunar locations
Among the early adopters of Cesium Moon Terrain is Ansys, which utilizes the data in conjunction with their RF Channel Modeler. This integration helps them understand the impacts of challenging lunar locations, such as polar regions, on the analysis and design of communication systems intended for use on the lunar surface.
Another organization utilizing Cesium Moon Terrain is Buendea, which is collaborating with NASA’s Advanced Operations Concept Lab to develop the XR Operations Support System (XOSS) for real-time simulations on the Moon and Mars. Buendea is interested in Cesium Moon Terrain for its potential to enhance their ongoing projects. “We’re excited about the potential of Cesium Moon Terrain to accelerate our work, including our efforts with NASA, to accurately plan and simulate explorations of the lunar surface,” said Julian Reyes, founder of Buendea.
Cesium Moon Terrain provides users with the ability to utilize the same workflows and functionality available in our open-source runtime engines. It serves as a versatile base layer, enabling the placement of models of habitats, vehicles, or rovers on the lunar surface. Additionally, if you possess high-resolution terrain data, you can seamlessly clip and inset it within Cesium Moon Terrain, allowing your projects to exist within a single continuous 3D surface instead of multiple separate project areas.
The demand for an open, interoperable, standards-based platform has never been greater, driven by ambitious initiatives like NASA’s Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to the Moon and eventually land them on Mars, as well as projects from SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin, and others. Cesium Moon Terrain meets this demand, offering a robust foundation for a wide range of applications.
