The Moon holds the largest inventory of landed hardware of any body other than Earth: six Apollo sites, six Luna landers and rovers together with the Luna 2 impactor, five Surveyors, four Chang’e descent stages, Chandrayaan-3 Vikram, SLIM, IM-1 Odysseus, IM-2 Athena, Blue Ghost M1, Beresheet and Hakuto-R M1. Six orbiters remain active: LRO and the ARTEMIS pair (NASA), Chandrayaan-2 (ISRO), Danuri (KARI) and Queqiao-2 (CNSA), with Queqiao-1 held at Earth–Moon L2 in support of Chang’e-4. The declared candidate sites are plotted alongside them: the nine NASA lunar-surface candidate regions of Release 24-136, the Chang’e-7 primary site on the Shackleton rim, its Shoemaker–Haworth backup, and the Chang’e-8 / ILRS-precursor site on the Mons Mouton plateau. Seven named permanently shadowed cold traps (Mazarico+2011; Zhao+2025) are overlaid; they define the volatile-sampling reach of both campaigns. One sidereal month is 27.32 d, so rotation relative to the orbiters resolves only above a time-acceleration factor of order 10³.
Recent changes
A source-tracked, append-only ledger of impacts, lander disturbances, newly measured craters and other observed changes to the lunar surface. Superseded claims are retained in the timeline alongside the measurements that refine them.
Community image · PVOL
Community observation
The newest indexed amateur image of the Moon is shown below the globe as observational context.
Catalog
Each asset with the orbital elements or selenographic coordinates from which it is propagated or placed. Selecting a card moves the camera to that asset.
Active Orbiters 6
Earth–Moon Lagrange Relay 1
Active Surface 2
Apollo Landing Sites 6
Luna Landers & Rovers 7
Surveyor Soft Landers 5
Recent (2019–2025) 9
NASA Artemis lunar-surface candidate regions 9
The nine refined regions of NASA Release 24-136 (28 Oct 2024), issued as the Artemis III shortlist. Under the architecture update of 27 Feb 2026, Artemis III becomes a mid-2027 low-Earth-orbit demonstration and Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028, becomes the first crewed lunar landing. NASA has not restated the candidate-region roster since that update; the nine regions are retained here as the standing set.
CNSA Chang'e-7 / Chang'e-8 / ILRS candidates 3
Chang’e-7 on the Shackleton rim with a Shoemaker–Haworth backup; Chang’e-8 and the ILRS basic-model station on the Mons Mouton plateau, formerly Leibnitz Beta. After Jones (SpaceNews, 2024) and Zhao et al. (2025).
Cold-trap science targets 7
Named permanently shadowed regions on the Chang’e-7 mini-flying-probe priority list (Zhao et al. 2025) and in the LOLA illumination atlas (Mazarico et al. 2011). These are sampling targets rather than landing sites, and are set in italic on the map.
Methodology
Propagation
Every Moon-orbiting spacecraft is propagated as a two-body Keplerian ellipse from its published mean orbital elements, with µMoon = 4902.800066 km³/s² and RMoon = 1737.4 km. Kepler's equation M = E − e·sin E is solved by Newton iteration each frame, and the orbital-plane state is rotated through the 3-1-3 Euler chain (Ω, i, ω) into the Moon-centered, J2000-aligned frame. Zonal-harmonic perturbations, which dominate the secular behaviour of the low-altitude orbiters (LRO, Chandrayaan-2, Danuri), are omitted: orbit shape and period are preserved, absolute phase is not. The ARTEMIS orbits are strongly Earth-perturbed and are not Keplerian; the elements adopted here are mean values reproducing scale and period only.
Surface positions
Surface assets are placed in Moon-fixed selenographic mean-Earth/mean-rotation coordinates with longitude positive east, then transformed to the inertial frame each frame by rotation about the spin axis at the IAU 2015 secular rate 13.17635815°/day from the prime-meridian reference at J2000, W0 = 38.3213° (Archinal et al. 2018). The periodic libration terms of the full rotation model are not applied; the largest carries amplitude 3.5610°, so body-fixed longitudes retain an error reaching about 3.6°, near 110 km at the equator.
Earth–Moon Lagrange
Queqiao-1, in its halo about Earth–Moon L2 some 64,500 km beyond the Moon, is catalogued but not rendered in the Moon-centered frame, its motion being governed by Earth's gravity rather than the Moon's. Rendering it would require a coupled three-body integration or a JPL Horizons state vector for SPKID –55.
References
Loading per-asset reference library…
The list below holds the cross-asset references from which the orbits, the surface positions and the candidate-region overlay are computed. Per-asset bibliographies, reachable from any marker or catalog card, are held in Data/refs/moon.json; the counts and refresh date above are read from that file at load time.
- Vondrak, R. R., Keller, J. W., Chin, G. & Garvin, J. 2010 — "Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO): Observations for Lunar Exploration and Science", Space Science Reviews 150, 7–22. doi:10.1007/s11214-010-9631-5
- Chauhan, M. & Chauhan, P. 2023 — "Chandrayaan-2 Mission", Encyclopedia of Lunar Science, 126–132. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-14541-9_227
- Song, Y.-J., Bae, J., Hong, S., Bang, J. et al. 2023 — "Post Trajectory Insertion Performance Analysis of Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter", Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences 40(3), 123–129. doi:10.5140/JASS.2023.40.3.123
- Shi, L., Cao, X., Man, H., Xu, D. et al. 2026 — "Design and Verification of TT&C System for Queqiao-2 Relay Satellite", Journal of Deep Space Exploration 13(2), 99–106. doi:10.3724/j.issn.2096-9287.2026.20250136
- Sweetser, T. H., Broschart, S. B., Angelopoulos, V. & Whiffen, G. J. 2011 — "ARTEMIS Mission Design", Space Science Reviews 165, 27–57. doi:10.1007/s11214-012-9869-1
- Angelopoulos, V. 2011 — "The ARTEMIS Mission", Space Science Reviews 165, 3–25. doi:10.1007/s11214-010-9687-2
- Wu, W., Tang, Y., Zhang, L. & Qiao, D. 2018 — "Design of communication relay mission for supporting lunar-farside soft landing", Science China Information Sciences 61(4), 040305. doi:10.1007/s11432-017-9202-1
- Davies, M. E. & Colvin, T. R. 2000 — "Lunar coordinates in the regions of the Apollo landers", Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 105(E8), 20277–20280. doi:10.1029/1999JE001165
- Robinson, M. S., Brylow, S. M., Tschimmel, M. et al. 2010 — "Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Instrument Overview", Space Science Reviews 150, 81–124. doi:10.1007/s11214-010-9634-2
- Wagner, R. V., Nelson, D. M., Plescia, J. B., Robinson, M. S. et al. 2017 — "Coordinates of anthropogenic features on the Moon", Icarus 283, 92–103. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2016.05.011 — source of the Apollo, Luna and Surveyor positions tabulated here
- Ip, W.-H., Yan, J., Li, C.-L. & Ouyang, Z.-Y. 2014 — "Preface: The Chang'e-3 lander and rover mission to the Moon", Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics 14(12), 1511–1513. doi:10.1088/1674-4527/14/12/001
- Jia, Y., Zou, Y., Ping, J., Xue, C. et al. 2018 — "The scientific objectives and payloads of Chang'E-4 mission", Planetary and Space Science 162, 207–215. doi:10.1016/j.pss.2018.02.011
- Li, C., Hu, H., Yang, M.-F. et al. 2021 — "Characteristics of the lunar samples returned by the Chang'E-5 mission", National Science Review 9(2), nwab188. doi:10.1093/nsr/nwab188
- Zhang, Q.-W.-L., Yang, M.-H., Li, Q.-L., Liu, Y. et al. 2024 — "Lunar farside volcanism 2.8 billion years ago from Chang'e-6 basalts", Nature 643, 356–360. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08382-0
- Chakraborty, T., Pandey, D. K., Mehra, R., Parasher, P. et al. 2024 — "Polarimetric characterization of Chandrayaan-3 landing site near lunar south pole using high resolution Chandrayaan-2 DFSAR data", Planetary and Space Science 251, 105956. doi:10.1016/j.pss.2024.105956
- JAXA / ISAS 2024 — SLIM pinpoint-landing demonstration, mission topics — agency release, not a peer-reviewed source
- Intuitive Machines 2024, 2025 — IM-1 Odysseus and IM-2 Athena mission reports — operator releases, not peer-reviewed sources
- Archinal, B. A., A'Hearn, M. F., Bowell, E. et al. 2018 — "Report of the IAU Working Group on Cartographic Coordinates and Rotational Elements: 2015", Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy 130, 22. doi:10.1007/s10569-017-9805-5 — source of W0, Ẇ, α0, δ0
- JPL Horizons — reference state vectors for lunar spacecraft
- NSSDC Planetary Science — catalog of historical lunar surface assets
- NASA 2024 — Release 24-136: nine refined Artemis III candidate landing regions (28 Oct 2024)
- NASA 2026 — "NASA Strengthens Artemis: Adds Mission, Refines Overall Architecture" (27 Feb 2026) — Artemis III to a mid-2027 low-Earth-orbit demonstration; Artemis IV to the first crewed landing, early 2028
- McClernan, M. T. et al. 2024 — USGS Lunar Grid Reference System: Artemis III candidate landing-site navigational grids (1 km / 100 m / 10 m)
- Peña-Asensio, E., Neira-Acosta, Á.-S. & Sánchez-Lozano, J. M. 2024 — "Evaluating potential landing sites for the Artemis III mission using a multi-criteria decision making approach", arXiv:2406.19863 — TOPSIS ranking of 1,247 HLS-compliant points across 13 candidate regions
- Mazarico, E., Neumann, G. A., Smith, D. E., Zuber, M. T. & Torrence, M. H. 2011 — "Illumination conditions of the lunar polar regions using LOLA topography", Icarus 211(2), 1066–1081. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.10.030
- Brown, H. M., Boyd, A. K., Denevi, B. W., Henriksen, M. R. et al. 2022 — "Resource potential of lunar permanently shadowed regions", Icarus 377, 114874. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114874
- Zhao, F., Lu, P., Meng, T., Dang, Y. et al. 2025 — "Selection of Landing Sites for the Chang'E-7 Mission Using Multi-Source Remote Sensing Data", Remote Sensing 17(7), 1121. doi:10.3390/rs17071121
- Wang, C., Jia, Y., Xue, C., Lin, Y. et al. 2024 — "Scientific objectives and payload configuration of the Chang'E-7 mission", National Science Review 11(2), nwad329. doi:10.1093/nsr/nwad329
- Jones, A. 2024 — "China's Chang'e-7 moon mission to target Shackleton crater", SpaceNews, 15 Sep 2024 — trade press, not a peer-reviewed source
- Bernhardt, H., Robinson, M. S. & Boyd, A. K. 2022 — "Geomorphic map and science target identification on the Shackleton-de Gerlache ridge", Icarus 379, 114963. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2022.114963
- Wüller, L. et al. 2025 — "Geologic History of the Mons Malapert and Mons Mouton Regions Near the Lunar South Pole: Basis for Future Exploration", Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 130(10), e2025JE009127. doi:10.1029/2025JE009127
- IAU WGPSN 2023 — Mons Mouton (formerly Leibnitz Beta), approved name, centre 84.6°S 31.0°E
- Colaprete, A., Schultz, P., Heldmann, J. et al. 2010 — "Detection of Water in the LCROSS Ejecta Plume", Science 330(6003), 463–468. doi:10.1126/science.1186986
Entry II in the RAVEN Satellite Location series · v3 · 2026-08-15 · candidate landing regions and cold-trap targets for the NASA and CNSA campaigns; uniform illumination, no terminator shading; 8K LROC/LOLA-derived globe texture (Solar System Scope, CC-BY 4.0)