Developed to aid NASA's Artemis mission and other space agencies worldwide, Cesium Moon Terrain is available to the public for advanced visualizations and simulations.
Cesium Moon Terrain includes precise terrain and imagery from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) program and other sources, delivered as 3D Tiles, an Open Geospatial Consortium Community Standard created by Cesium.
"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," said Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi. "Cesium Moon Terrain will enable engineers, system integrators, and digital content creators to build simulations, mission plans, and real-time operations experiences."
The dataset was recently showcased at the Digital Twin for Lunar Development Workshop at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, bringing together the space enterprise community to advance digital twins for NASA and develop an open, interoperable lunar digital ecosystem.
Early adopters of Cesium Moon Terrain include Ansys, which uses the data with their RF Channel Modeler to assess the impacts of lunar locations, such as polar regions, on communications system designs.
Buendea, in collaboration with the NASA Advanced Operations Concept Lab, is using Cesium Moon Terrain to enhance the XR Operations Support System (XOSS) for real-time simulations on the Moon and Mars. "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.
To access Cesium Moon Terrain, sign up for an account at or log in to Cesium ion. Users can create a Cesium Story, integrate the data into a web application with CesiumJS, or build advanced visualizations with Cesium for Unreal and Cesium for Unity. The dataset is also available for Cesium ion Self-Hosted.
Cesium Moon Terrain can serve as a base layer for placing models of habitats, vehicles, or rovers on the lunar surface. Users can also embed their high-resolution terrain data within Cesium Moon Terrain to create a seamless and accurate 3D environment.
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