A One Time Only Opportunity for a Coordinated International Effort to Understand the Lunar Surface Environment and Its Transformation Through Exploration----International Space Science Institute

A One Time Only Opportunity for a Coordinated International Effort to Understand the Lunar Surface Environment and Its Transformation Through Exploration

09,09, 2026

09,09, 2026 | 【 A A A 】 | 【Print】【Close】

Image: Borys Zaitsev / Pexels

Context

This ISSI Forum proposes to unite international experts to identify and coordinate scientific investigations focused on the Moon's pristine surface environment.

With renewed global interest in lunar exploration, multiple missions are being deployed within this decade. ESA's Terrae Novae, Artemis, Chang'e, Chandrayaan, and international commercial ventures are converging on the Moon's surface. This growth in human activity on the Moon will change the fragile environment, and most likely already has.

Humanity has a one-time only opportunity to coordinate efforts and make measurements of the lunar environment while it remains pristine. ISSI's platform is uniquely suited to bring together scientific experts from across the world to align priorities, share strategies, and define a collaborative path forward.

The ISSI Forum's interdisciplinary model will foster cross-pollination of insights and methodologies, generating integrated science goals and operational recommendations. By aligning data collection efforts across space agencies and mission timelines, we can achieve a holistic understanding of the Moon's changing environment.

Objectives

- Explore opportunities for coordinated multi-mission observations to enable synergistic science that individual missions cannot achieve alone, for instance by using distributed lunar surface assets to observe global environmental phenomena or as an in-situ Earth magnetospheric observatory.

- Define the measurements needed to characterize the lunar near-surface environment, including plasma, ambient (E, B) fields, dust, radiation, micrometeoroids and the exosphere including the relationship with polar cold trapped volatiles.

- Determine priority measurement areas of interests and locations (e.g, polar regions, permanently shaded areas, mare or highland regions, lunar swirls, the terminators lunar wake, solar wind, magnetosheath, lobes, magnetotail) to capture environmental spatial and temporal variabilities.

- Understand the influence of this environment on exploration systems performances degradation and lifetime as well as human health.

- Assess how ongoing and future exploration activities are modifying lunar conditions (e.g. rocket exhaust gasses, tanks venting, structures outgassing, regolith redistribution etc..).

Date: 14-15 October, 2026

Conveners

Chi Wang	National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Yang Liu	National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
James Carpenter	European Space Agency, The Netherlands
Fabrice Cipriani	European Space Agency, The Netherlands
Stas Barabash	Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Sweden

Forums