A SpaceX The starship lander will land with the first humans to walk on Month since 1972 in one of the nine sites at the lunar South Pole during Artemis 3 mission, GODMOTHER announced on Tuesday.

The space agency first revealed larger group of potential landing zones in August 2022. Over the past two years, NASA’s Cross Agency Site Selection Analysis Team has successfully narrowed the initial 13 landing candidates to nine sites.

To narrow down the candidate sites, a team of scientists and engineers used data from a NASA spacecraft currently flying around the moon, known as Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), along with lunar science research.

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“The South Pole of the Moon is a completely different environment than we landed in during the Apollo missions,” said Sarah Noble, NASA’s Artemis Lunar Science Director. “It provides access to some of the oldest lunar terrain, as well as cold, shadow regions that may contain water and other compounds. Any of these landing regions will allow us to do amazing science and make new discoveries.”

This image shows nine candidate landing regions for NASA’s Artemis III mission, each region containing several potential sites for the first manned lunar landing in more than 50 years. The background image of the lunar terrain at the South Pole in the nine regions is a mosaic of LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) WAC (Wide Angle Camera) images.

(GODMOTHER)

The teams considered several factors, including scientific potential, terrain, lighting and whether the landing trajectory would be compatible with NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft and SpaceX’s Starship.

The lunar South Pole is an area of ​​the Moon completely unexplored by humans and contains places that are permanently in darkness.

NASA has awarded SpaceX first contact with the Artemis human landing system, during which the private company will land the first humans on the moon since Apollo 17. Artemis 3 is expected to be a week-long mission to the South Pole.

The final landing site will not be determined until NASA selects its target launch dates for the Artemis III mission.