Creating a Digital Twin of the Moon

Space missions have always depended on simulation. What has changed is the fidelity, scope, and practical value of those simulations.

As NASA and the broader space community prepare for future Artemis missions, those advances are becoming essential. Returning humans to the Moon and establishing a sustained presence there will require more than launch, flight, and landing capabilities. It will also require communications systems that perform reliably in an extreme and largely unfamiliar environment.

Every asset, assumption, and variable must be tested and validated well before launch. That includes the high-bandwidth cellular network planned for the lunar surface and the antenna-bearing systems that will depend on it, including spacesuits, rovers, landers, and orbital relays.

At Synopsys, we are helping create a digital twin of the Moon to test and validate those systems.

Working with Cesium, part of Bentley Systems, Keysight, and NASA’s Glenn Research Center through the Lunar 3^rd Generation Partnership Project (Lunar 3GPP), we are combining high-fidelity topography, communications modeling, mission dynamics, and hardware validation in a virtual environment designed to support Artemis planning and operations.

A communications system is only as reliable as the antennas connecting it.

In a lunar mission, antennas are embedded in everything: the cellular infrastructure itself, the spacesuits astronauts wear, the rovers they drive, the landers that carry crews and cargo, and the relays on the surface and orbiting overhead. Each of those antennas must perform in a different physical configuration, on a different platform, under different conditions of movement and orientation.

The digital twin allows engineers on Earth to evaluate that performance in context. High-fidelity antenna models are placed onto detailed representations of the assets on which they will be mounted, then assessed as those assets move through realistic mission scenarios. What looks robust in isolation may behave very differently on a rover crossing uneven terrain or in a spacesuit as an astronaut turns, bends, and moves on the lunar surface.

In addition to reducing signal quality, poor antenna performance can disrupt telemetry, delay commands, weaken situational awareness, and narrow safety margins for astronauts operating with little room for error.

By modeling antennas as part of the full mission environment rather than as standalone components, engineers can see how platform design, motion, terrain, and network dynamics affect communications performance.

Even the most sophisticated simulation has to demonstrate that it can predict how real systems will behave.

That is why the digital twin extends beyond software. Synthetic data generated from the simulated lunar environment drives physical communications hardware in the lab, enabling end-to-end validation of how systems are expected to perform under mission conditions.

Working with Keysight, this data is fed directly into RF test and measurement equipment, allowing engineers to connect the digital twin to real hardware. This creates a continuous path from modeled lunar terrain and mission dynamics to antenna behavior and real hardware performance.

That turns the model from an analytical tool into a practical test environment. Engineers can evaluate not only whether a propagation model looks realistic, but whether hardware behaves as expected when exposed to the terrain effects and signal conditions the model produces.

The speed of simulation is also a major advantage.

Because these scenario simulations can run in milliseconds, teams can test far more conditions than would be practical through conventional hardware evaluation alone. They can vary terrain position, asset orientation, relay geometry, and motion trajectories to see how the system responds across a much larger set of possibilities.

One of the most compelling outcomes is that communications performance becomes easier to interpret across disciplines. By using synthetic mission data to drive real 5G radios, engineers can do more than review plots and waveforms. They can hear what a voice connection would sound like in a lunar mission scenario — the dropouts as a rover passes behind a ridge, the static as a relay shifts overhead, and the clarity returning when line of sight is restored.

That direct experience helps multidisciplinary teams make better decisions faster. RF engineers, aerospace teams, software developers, mission planners, and program leaders can assess the same scenario from their own perspectives while working from a shared understanding of system behavior. It becomes easier to identify weaknesses, refine designs, and decide what needs to improve before launch.

At that point, the digital twin is doing more than representing the lunar surface. It is helping validate how a full communications architecture is likely to perform before any part of it is deployed on the Moon.