Lunar Surface

Accurate wheel slip estimation is essential for autonomous lunar rover mobility and navigation. Machine Learning models trained on terrestrial data generalize poorly to lunar terrain, and real lunar datasets are scarce due to the limited number of missions and costly data acquisition. We present Fleet-to-Lab, a transfer learning framework that leverages proprioceptive data collected by previously deployed heterogeneous lunar rovers to mitigate the Earth-Moon domain gap in slip estimation for a future deployable unit. We fuse several heterogeneous expert models into a single architecture, using a modest dataset collected after the rover deployment. We propose AcoMerge, a new hybrid swarm-intelligence algorithm that performs model fusion by searching for an optimal combi- nation of expert parameters. Experiments conducted in a high- fidelity physics simulation show balanced accuracy and macro- F1 improvements compared to deep model fusion baselines. AcoMerge exhibits competitive performance with joint training on deep architectures, while achieving higher macro-F1 and balanced accuracy on a smaller model. Overall, our framework shows model fusion as a possible transfer learning alternative for slippage estimation in space robotic missions with limited data.

Modeling the Martian nightside thermosphere remains challenging due to sparse in situ sampling and strong coupling among transport, magnetic, and seasonal processes. Purely data-driven models can produce non-physical artifacts, such as density inversions, in poorly sampled altitude regimes. We present a multi-task physics-informed neural network that simultaneously predicts the base-10 logarithmic densities of four neutral species (O, CO$_2$, N$_2$, and Ar) using more than a decade of MAVEN/NGIMS observations (MY 32-38, 2014-2025). A shared backbone learns a common representation of the nightside thermospheric state and branches into species-specific output heads. A weak monotonicity prior is incorporated via automatic differentiation by penalizing positive vertical gradients in logarithmic density. Experiments using an orbit-disjoint train/validation/test split show that physics-informed regularization substantially reduces non-physical inversions while preserving predictive skill and slightly improving it in the best-performing configuration, as measured by RMSE, MAE, and $R^2$. The resulting model provides a computationally efficient surrogate for nightside thermospheric reconstruction with improved vertical consistency.

For autonomous space exploration, robotic agents need to perform motion planning in which environmental interactions may be unknown. Learning these interactions, such as terrain mechanics for wheeled robots, can introduce uncertainties that lead to risky motion plans and potentially hazardous operations or mission failures. Moreover, uncertainties induced by perception-based systems can exacerbate the problem of safe motion planning. In this letter, we address the problem of performing cost-optimal kinodynamic motion planning with risk awareness. We approach this in two steps. First, a sampling-based planner (AO-RRT) generates a dynamically feasible, risk-aware, and asymptotically cost-optimal trajectory. Second, we formulate motion planning as a nonlinear optimization problem and solve it using sequential convex programming (SCP), using the AO-RRT trajectory as an initial solution. By quantifying risk using conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), we demonstrate a reduction in risk by over $\sim$97% across trajectories in simulation and hardware experiments.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been collecting high-resolution images (at around 0.5-2 meters per pixel linearly with its Narrow Angle Camera) of the Moon since 2009, amassing a large dataset of images and offering researchers the opportunity to study the surface of the Moon at unprecedented scale. Here, we aim to test the abilities of the Beta-Variational Autoencoder (VAE) created by Lesnikowski et al. (2024), an unsupervised learning model which identifies anomalous features across the Moon's surface, locating not only scientifically useful geologic formations such as rockfall deposits, fresh impact craters, irregular mare patches, or volcanic pits/collapsed lava tubes, but also artificial objects such as landed spacecraft. This investigation further gauged the model's ability to locate anomalous surface features, successfully recovering two places of interest (Plaskett Crater and Paracelsus C Crater) and numerous landed technological assets at a statistically significant rate.

Planetary geology relies on historical, interpretive reasoning to reconstruct past events from diverse observations. Here, we present a step toward an automated "machine intelligence geologist" by embedding this distinct methodology of geologic knowledge discovery and inference into a multimodal vision-language architecture. Focusing on the stratigraphy of lunar basaltic mare volcanism, we train a model to generate verifiably grounded geologic interpretations directly from co-registered topographic, spectral, and geologic maps. We demonstrate that while the system successfully balances established geological priors with local visual evidence to accurately describe stratigraphy and terrain, numeric age dating derived solely from vision defaults to memorized priors. Integrating an open-book retrieval mechanism resolves this, enabling the model to faithfully cite published chronologies. Our findings delineate the necessary architecture for automated geologic inference: site evidence must be visually interpreted from local data, while quantitative historical context must be retrieved from the scientific record.

We investigate the transferability of Earth weather foundation models to planetary atmospheres by adapting the GraphCast graph neural weather forecasting model to Mars. While GraphCast achieves state-of-the-art performance for terrestrial forecasting, its applicability to non-Earth environments remains unexplored. Using the Mars Climate Database (MCD), which provides global atmospheric fields across vertical altitude levels (similar to Earth pressure levels), we evaluate zero-shot and fine-tuned GraphCast predictions of Martian temperature and wind fields. Zero-shot forecasts produce a surprisingly accurate depiction of current conditions but fail to reproduce diurnal variability and rapidly decay toward climatological mean states. To address this limitation, we fine-tune GraphCast using MCD variables and top-of-atmosphere solar radiation forcing while holding humidity constant. Fine-tuning enables rapid learning of Martian thermal variability. Within as few as 10 training epochs, the model begins to capture the diurnal cycle and forecasts up to 10 days reproduce seasonal and vertical temperature structure. Prediction quality improves with training sample size and exhibits sensitivity to seasonal initialization. These results demonstrate that Earth-trained AI weather models can be adapted to simulate Martian atmospheric dynamics, providing a pathway toward rapid planetary weather prediction to support mission operations, dust storm risk mitigation, and future human exploration.

The renewed global focus on lunar exploration, driven by the prospect of in-situ resource utilization and a sustained human presence on the Moon, has created growing demand for accurate, large-scale characterization of the lunar surface. Although vast quantities of orbital remote-sensing data have been collected, scientific analysis and resource mapping remain fragmented by heterogeneous multiinstrument observations, sparse labels, and bespoke task-specific modelling workflows. Here we introduce LunarFM, a multimodal foundation model that learns a general representation of the lunar surface from diverse orbital measurements. LunarFM assimilates observations from six instruments across three lunar missions, mapping 18 input channels to a shared embedding space. We demonstrate that this embedding space supports a diverse range of downstream applications, including similarity search, few-shot resource mapping, mineral abundance regression, and geological unit classification, enabling efficient scientific investigation and resource-oriented analysis. We provide a machine-learning-ready dataset of co-registered multimodal observations spanning latitudes from 70°S to 70°N, a pretrained multimodal masked autoencoder, and a companion embedding dataset providing a joint 768-dimensional representation of lunar surface properties. All code and data are available at https://lunarfm.trillium.tech/

Maintaining global position awareness is a fundamental challenge for planetary surface exploration, since satellite-based positioning systems are unavailable and onboard odometry drifts over time. Although orbital mapping products, such as overhead imagery and terrain-derived maps, provide global context, aligning them with surface observations is challenging due to large viewpoint differences, low texture, repetitive terrain, and drastic changes in appearance caused by varying illumination and topography. We introduce a new cross-view geo-localization benchmark built from physically rendered surface panoramas and overhead tiles derived from a high-resolution lunar terrain model. Our dataset contains 10438 ground views rendered as 360$^\circ$ surface panoramas with matching overhead images precisely centered at the same location. Additionally, a set of overlapping tiles is provided to study off-center localization with multiple plausible candidates per panorama. We study the performance of a state-of-the-art transformer-based geo-localization method on our data, by training it from scratch and reporting retrieval accuracy. Our results demonstrate that learning-based cross-view localization methods can be successfully applied to the domain of planetary surfaces, providing a vision-based alternative to global navigation satellite systems.

Long-term records of the Martian atmosphere based on general circulation models and reanalysis of atmospheric state variables are important to understand the diurnal, seasonal, and climatological changes of the planet. Atmospheric dynamics of the Martian atmosphere are strongly influenced by the characterization of dust lifting, solar insolation, and spatial variations in topography. We present ARCO-Mars, a unified Analysis-Ready Cloud-Optimized dataset providing integrated access to three independent Mars atmospheric reanalysis products: EMARS, MACDA, and OpenMARS spanning over Mars Years 24-35. These reanalyses assimilate thermal infrared retrievals from the MGS/TES, ODY/THEMIS, and MRO/MCS instruments, providing both two and three-dimensional surface and atmospheric state variables, including temperature, winds, surface pressure, and dust optical depth. The dataset is stored in Zarr v3 format and hosted on HuggingFace, enabling efficient cloud-based access without requiring local storage of the full archive. We compare the state variables between the three reanalysis products to identify systematic differences, attributed to differences in data assimilation and general circulation models. ARCO-Mars provides a community resource for Mars atmospheric science, numerical weather prediction validation, and machine learning applications, including weather forecasting and data assimilation.

Researchers are interested in learning about Mars so that it may eventually become habitable for humans. To achieve this, there is a need for comprehensive knowledge of the planet's atmosphere, hydrology, surface chemistry, radiation environment, and spatial features through the scientific literature. These contain valuable information and meaningful quantitative constraints that can be used in other models and studies, such as habitability assessment and future terraforming studies. We present TerraMARS, an end-to-end information extraction pipeline that combines a domain-adapted Small Language Model to answer Mars terraforming-related questions and convert unstructured Mars science text into machine-readable structured outputs in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. A corpus of open-access papers is collected and processed using a multistage retrieval and chunking framework. Google Gemma 3 1B was adapted to the domain using Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning on Mars-specific question-answering and information extraction datasets. The resulting pipeline generates both types of output and provides a foundation for integrating knowledge from scientific literature into downstream applications like digital twins and habitability modeling for Mars. The output from this pipeline looks promising, but further improvements are needed to increase extraction accuracy and factual consistency.

Detecting the tiny Doppler shifts induced by Earth-mass planets in stellar radial-velocity measurements remains extremely challenging due to stellar activity. Many deep-learning methods performing well on simulated data remain difficult to apply reliably on real stellar spectra. The aim of this work is to develop a deep-learning framework that generalizes to real, unseen spectra and improves the detectability of Earth-mass planets in radial-velocity data. We train artificial neural networks on HARPS-N solar spectra with injected planetary signals, using physics-motivated spectral representations based on flux and line-formation temperature, together with their velocity gradients. Two training strategies are explored: hold-out testing and cross-validation. Model robustness is enhanced through genetic-algorithm-based hyperparameter optimization, and predictive uncertainty is quantified using Monte Carlo dropout. Our most precise neural network model reliably retrieves, under the cross-validation strategy, the amplitudes, phases, and orbital periods of planetary signals with amplitudes greater than or equal to 25 cm/s and periods between 10 and 550 days. In addition, in all cases tested here, the successfully recovered signals correspond to the most significant peaks in the periodograms of the Doppler-shift predictions. Temperature-based spectral-shell representations consistently outperform flux-based shells. We also release doppleriann, a Python package implementing the proposed framework. Our results demonstrate that combining physically motivated spectral representations with deep learning provides a promising pathway toward the detection of Earth-mass planets in radial-velocity data from real observations, supported by a modeling framework that is both physically grounded and statistically rigorous, incorporating uncertainty quantification and optimized training strategies.

Increasing the resolution of planetary topography models can enable a better understanding of surface processes and geomorphology; however, existing analytical super-resolution methods are expensive and difficult to apply at large scales. Generative models provide the tools to learn complex relationships within data and can be applied at scale due to hardware accelerators and parallelization. We present a diffusion-based Schrödinger Bridge (SB) generative modeling approach for lunar topography super-resolution, connecting the distribution of low-resolution topography to that of high-resolution topography, incorporating physically-constraining optical imagery. Our approach is inspired by existing Shape-from-Shading methods, which improve a priori low-resolution topography by using optical images at the target resolution. We train SBs on a novel dataset of rendered lunar topography, emulating optical imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow Angle Camera. The result is a flexible approach for topography super-resolution which can provide pixel-level uncertainties in the reconstruction.

To better understand Martian Surface, which is needed to enable Rovers navigate Mars with ease, it is necessary to be able to determine the location of mounds. Detecting and studying these morphologies can also help us find evidence of extraterrestrial life, in this case, more specifically, water or signs of life conducive environments. Detection of mounds was done by manually mapping morphological parameters onto Digital Elevation Models. This paper solves the problem by automatically detecting and or predicting mounds on Mars using Neural Network based Semantic Segmentation methodologies. This is done by using supervised semantic segmentation model and generative adversarial approach. A comparison of the approaches shows that adding extra artificially generated data did not improve the result.

Accurate position estimation is crucial for the successful implementation of future lunar landings using autonomous vehicles, especially in dangerous environments with sparse terrain features. In this paper, we propose a terrain relative navigation (TRN) algorithm combining our deep-learning crater detector, which was designed specifically for the NASA Crater Detection Challenge problem, and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Our detector analyzes crater features from the monocular images acquired from orbit, and their matches with craters from a global database are identified via a Hungarian assignment approach followed by the consensus-based outliers removal method. The estimated measurements are then used to refine an EKF, where spacecraft pose estimation in the Lunar-Centered Lunar-Fixed (LCLF) frame of reference, augmented with altitude aiding information, constrains radial drift. The simulation results indicate that even if the spacecraft is off from its actual location up to 5 km, TRN could recover from this situation, achieving navigation error reduction to a few hundred meters. It should be noted that in order to maintain crater feature correspondences, it is important to match the image resolution and the scales within the scene to the detector training set distribution.

Precise rover localization is a prerequisite for autonomous lunar exploration, yet the absence of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and the cumulative drift of local localization methods severely constrain long-range missions. Cross-view localization provides a promising drift-free global solution by matching rover-view and satellite-view imagery. However, the lunar environment poses unique challenges for correspondence alignment, including inter-entity entanglement, inter-viewpoint divergence, and simulation-to-real domain shift. To address these challenges, we propose Warped Alignment of Reprojected Graphs (WARG), a framework that leverages unified graph learning and reprojected graph matching for robust cross-view alignment. Pretrained on the synthetic LuSNAR dataset, WARG achieves an average test error of 0.32 m and demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization to the synthetic lunar south pole region with an error of 3.63 m. More importantly, when validated on real-world data from the YuTu-2 rover, WARG achieves a localization error of 1.68 m within a 100 m x 100 m search area, corresponding to nearly one-pixel precision in low-resolution satellite imagery with a spatial resolution of 1.40 m/pixel. Beyond accuracy, WARG is computationally efficient, containing only 1.56M parameters, corresponding to 16.12% of previous lightweight models, and operating at 5.49 Hz on an NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU, approaching GNSS-level update frequency. Finally, we observe that WARG naturally develops low-level spatial awareness, including semantic segmentation and structural reasoning, through cross-view localization learning, highlighting its potential as a promising paradigm for spatial intelligence with minimal annotation cost. The source code is available at https://github.com/maochen-casia/warg.

Reconstructing printable 3D models from Mars rover imagery is challenging because Martian terrain is low-texture, irregular, and partially observed. We evaluate a pipeline that estimates stereo depth from NASA Curiosity images, completes geometry, and exports watertight OBJ meshes. On Middlebury, RAFT-Stereo outperforms semi-global block matching (SGBM), reducing disparity MAE from 3.22px to 0.73px and increasing valid prediction coverage from 76.3% to 100.0%. On Curiosity imagery, however, RAFT's denser disparities show weaker edge alignment and higher photometric reprojection error, suggesting that benchmark accuracy does not directly transfer to Martian terrain reconstruction. Geometry completion demonstrates a tradeoff between local fidelity and global connectivity. We find that alpha shapes preserve accurate but fragmented structure, Poisson reconstruction produces more coherent meshes but adds unsupported surfaces, and a deterministic diffusion-fill baseline is intermediate but sensitive to stereo quality. Overall, standard stereo and completion methods can produce printable approximations of Martian terrain, but reliable reconstruction requires stronger domain-specific validation.

Deploying legged robots in extra-terrestrial environments includes many challenges due to complex terrain interactions, energy, and thermal constraints. For effective mechanical design of a lunar exploration quadrupedal robot, careful consideration of motor torques, energy expenditure, and cost of transport is required. The lunar surface is composed of granular regolith, which impacts the locomotion of legged robots and their performance. Locomotion algorithms trained with rigid contact assumptions are also ineffective when applied to environments with soft contacts, such as granular surfaces, which can result in instability and poor tracking. In this report, the physical modelling of the granular lunar surface-robot foot contacts is applied to a simulation environment with locomotion trained using Reinforcement Learning. A comparison is conducted between the policy trained on rigid contact and soft contact environments, analysing the gait and locomotion performance metrics. The analysis demonstrates that soft contacts simulating regolith surfaces pose additional challenges for Reinforcement Learning based training, result in a qualitatively different gait, and increase the overall energy expenditure.

Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) provides smooth, high-rate state estimates and has been widely used for robotic navigation in both terrestrial and planetary applications. However, its performance is typically dependent on the frequency of visual updates, which is a challenge for planetary rovers operating under extreme resource constraints and low frame rates. This work investigates enabling reliable VIO with very sparse visual updates for lunar rover applications, addressing both day and night-time operations where feature associations become especially difficult under self-illumination conditions. We propose a Bird's Eye View (BEV)-based image matching scheme that remains robust to larger inter-frame motions and more reliable feature matching despite significant visual appearance changes. We extensively evaluate our proposed approach, BEVIO, through high-fidelity photorealistic lunar and real-time robotic experiments conducted using a half-scale lunar rover, in a long-term day-night deployment at Plaster City, CA, USA. The results demonstrate that our method enables reliable day and nighttime self-illuminated traverses at visual update rates as low as 0.25 Hz, underscoring its suitability for navigation on power- and compute-limited lunar rovers.

Aerial navigation on Mars requires vision-based pipelines that are robust to the diverse illumination conditions and terrain morphology of the Martian surface. A key bottleneck for training and evaluating such methods is the scarcity of large-scale, annotated aerial datasets. We present MARTIAN, an open-source Blender-based rendering framework that leverages real HiRISE orbital map products to synthesize realistic aerial views of the Martian terrain under controllable lighting conditions and at varying altitudes. MARTIAN generates observations with accurate pose annotations, directly addressing the scarcity of training data for vision-based navigation on Mars. The framework has been validated through its deployment in concurrent work on map-based localization systems for Ingenuity and future Mars rotorcraft, where synthetically trained deep image matchers were successfully evaluated on real Mars imagery. MARTIAN is publicly available at: https://github.com/nasa-jpl/martian.

Autonomous space systems operating in extreme thermal environments require accurate and efficient thermal modeling to support both pre-mission system design and onboard autonomy. For lunar rovers, large temperature gradients, radiative heat transfer, and variable surface conditions make reliable thermal prediction especially challenging. High-fidelity physics-based simulations provide accurate results but are computationally expensive, while simplified models and lookup-table approach often lack sufficient accuracy. Physics-informed machine learning (PIML) offers a promising alternative by combining data-driven models with embedded physical knowledge. This paper presents a PIML framework for thermal analysis of a simplified lunar rover with internal heat sources, where machine learning enables environment-adaptive coarse meshing. The proposed architecture integrates a transfer neural network (TNN) that adaptively determines 3D finite-difference nodalization based on thermal loads and initial conditions, enabling more accurate coarse-mesh calculations. A differentiable finite-difference thermal simulator is embedded within the framework to enforce physical consistency and support efficient training, while an upscaling layer reconstructs high-resolution temperature fields from the coarse-grid solution. The proposed PIML approach is evaluated against high-fidelity fine-mesh simulations, low-fidelity fixed coarse-mesh models, and a purely data-driven artificial neural network (ANN). Results show that the PIML framework improves prediction accuracy by 50% and 39% relative to the coarse-mesh physics model and ANN model, respectively, while maintaining physically consistent thermal distributions. Computationally, the framework is also 3x faster than high-fidelity simulations, demonstrating an effective balance between accuracy and efficiency for thermal modeling of lunar rover systems.

The martian atmosphere hosts dynamical phenomena ranging from planet-encircling dust storms to mesoscale orographic clouds and nocturnal low-level jets. General circulation model show capability to simulate these phenomena, but is computationally expensive at resolution needed to resolve mesoscale features. While assimilation of satellite remote sensing observation enable forecasting capabilities using such models, observation record is often sparse, short and fragmented across instrument generators. These constraints motivate the development of a data-driven foundation model for the Martian atmosphere. Foundation models live in a complex design landscape. There is an interplay between the available data, the physics of the underlying processes and corresponding developments in AI. Even though the idea of a foundation model is to address multiple use cases in a data- and compute-efficient manner, it is important to have a clear picture what applications can sensibly addressed by a single model. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate this design landscape. We discuss available data ranging from atmospheric retrievals to reanalysis datasets as well as existing physical models. Moreover, we identify a wide range of candidate downstream applications. Finally, we consider relevant recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) that can be leveraged in this context. Here, we put a particular emphasis on AI models for atmospheric physics, data-driven approaches to data assimilation as well as methods to work in a limited data setting.

Optical navigation is a critical component for lunar orbiter and lander missions. Image-based crater identification has emerged as a promising technology for optical navigation due to the abundance of craters on the lunar surface and the availability of extensive crater catalogs. Moreover, due to the relative morphological homogeneity among lunar craters, template matching has been identified as a promising approach for identification. In this paper, we propose EigenCrater, an automated crater template generation method based on principal component analysis of crater digital elevation maps (DEMs). We demonstrate superior detection and position estimation performance relative to hand-picked templates on simulated lunar imagery.

Radiometric inconsistencies remain a major challenge in generating seamless lunar mosaics from multi-mission orbital imagery due to variability in illumination geometry, sensor characteristics, and acquisition conditions. This paper presents a deep learning-based radiometric normalization framework for multi-mission lunar mosaics constructed primarily from ISRO's Chandrayaan-2 Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) data, supplemented with auxiliary imagery from the SELENE (Kaguya) mission. The proposed approach employs a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) comprising a U-Net-based generator and a PatchGAN discriminator to learn a nonlinear radiometric mapping from conventionally mosaicked lunar imagery to a photometrically consistent reference derived from LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) data. A patch-based training strategy with overlap-aware inference is adopted to enable scalable processing of large-area mosaics while preserving structural continuity across tile boundaries. Quantitative evaluation using Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) demonstrates consistent improvements over traditional histogram-based normalization techniques. The proposed framework achieves enhanced tonal uniformity, reduced seam artifacts, and improved structural coherence across multi-source lunar datasets. These results highlight the effectiveness of learning-based radiometric normalization for large-scale planetary mosaicking and demonstrate its potential for generating high-fidelity lunar surface maps from heterogeneous orbital imagery.

This study analyses simulated and real-world implementations of depth-aware rover navigation, highlighting the transition from stereo vision to monocular depth estimation using edge AI. A Unity-based lunar terrain simulator with stereo cameras and OpenCV's StereoSGBM was used to generate disparity maps. A physical rover built on Raspberry Pi 4 employed UniDepthV2 for monocular metric depth estimation and YOLO12n for real-time object detection. While stereo vision yielded higher accuracy in simulation, the monocular approach proved more robust and cost-effective in real-world deployment, achieving 0.1 FPS for depth and 10 FPS for detection.

Synthetic image generation is one of the crucial input for planetary missions. It enables researchers and engineers to visualize planned planetary missions, test imaging systems and plan exploration activities in a virtual environment before actual deployment. Image simulation is essential for assessing landing sites, detecting hazards, and validating navigation systems in a missions. This study offers a detailed evaluation of various image simulation approaches for the lunar environment, with particular emphasis on the effects of different camera models and light illumination conditions on the quality of synthetic lunar images. These images are produced using real Digital Elevation Models (DEM) and terrain data derived from instruments such as Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) and NASA's Wide Angle Camera (WAC), and Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) instruments. This research aims to improve the reliability of synthetic imagery in supporting autonomous navigation and decision-making systems in lunar exploration. This work contributes to the development of more effective tools for generating important information for future lunar missions and enhances the understanding of the moon's surface environment.

Recent times have seen an increase in demand of high quality Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) for the lunar surface, because they are highly important for studying the moon and planning future missions. However, there is an evident lack of detailed elevation data on the Moon. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes a novel deep learning method that estimates and generates a surface elevation map directly from monocular images of the surface. The dataset used comprises of the Chandrayaan-2 Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) images with their corresponding Digital Terrain Models (DTMs). The study proposes LunarDepthNet, which comprises of a UNet architecture to generate DEMS. It incorporates an EfficientNet encoder and custom layers to correctly learn how the light shadows on the surface relate to the actual elevation values. A combined loss function was also utilized to keep the terrain details accurate and smooth. During validation, the model showed a stable loss convergence of 12%. It achieved a mean nRMSE of 0.437 and an MAE of 4.5m in the testing stage. These results prove the model can generate dependable elevation maps from single orbital images, which are quite useful in regions of the moon where stereo-images are not available.

This study presents a Shape from Shading (SfS) framework to enhance sub-metre resolution lunar digital elevation models (DEMs) using imagery from the Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) aboard Chandrayaan-2. The framework applies SfS to an independent OHRC image of the same region, enabling SfS not just as a refinement tool, but as a source of new topographic data, unconstrained by stereo baseline limitations. The method is applied across three lunar sites, including the Cyrillus crater, the Vikram landing region, and the lunar south pole (Mons Mouton), with a systematic three-stage parameter sweep on the SfS smoothness weight. Results show measurable topographic enhancement, particularly in surface slope statistics, revealing fine-scale crater morphology previously unresolved. A limiting case is also characterized, where large pitch angle separation between the shading image and stereo pair reduces SfS sensitivity, and partial footprint coverage of the shading image is identified as a factor influencing spatially variable enhancement quality.

The plasma environment around Mars is highly variable because it is strongly influenced by the solar wind. Accurate identification of plasma regions around Mars is important for the community studying solar wind-Mars interactions, region-specific plasma processes, and atmospheric escape. In this study, we develop a machine-learning-based classifier to automatically identify three key plasma regions--solar wind, magnetosheath, and induced magnetosphere--using only ion omnidirectional energy spectra measured by the MAVEN Solar Wind Ion Analyzer (SWIA). Two neural network architectures are evaluated: a multilayer perceptron (MLP) and a convolutional neural network (CNN) that incorporates short temporal sequences. Our results show that the CNN can reliably distinguish the three plasma regions, whereas the MLP struggles to separate the solar wind and magnetosheath. Therefore, the CNN-based approach provides an efficient and accurate framework for large-scale plasma region identification at Mars and can be readily applied to future planetary missions.

The spectral kernel field equation R[k] = T[k] lacks a conservation-law analog. We prove (i) the fixed-point flow is strictly volume-expanding (tr DF > 0), precluding automatic conservation, and (ii) the conservation deficit per mode equals the Hessian stability margin exactly: D_m = -Delta'. Closing the deficit requires a scene-side compensating contribution, which we formalise as the distinction dynamics equation dc/dt = G[c, h_t], with MaxCal-optimal realisation G_opt. On fixed-topology 3D surface graphs we derive a conditional topology-preserving compression theorem: retaining k >= beta_0 + beta_1 modes (under a spectral-ordering assumption) preserves all Betti-number charges; we include a worked short-cycle counterexample (figure-eight) calibrating when the assumption fails. A triple necessary spectral diagnostic -- Fiedler-mode concentration, elevated curl energy, anomalous beta_1 -- is derived for planetary drainage networks at O(N) cost. Two internal real-data sequences serve as preliminary consistency checks; full benchmarks and adaptive-topology extensions are deferred.

A key factor for lunar mission planning is the ability to assess the local availability of raw materials. However, many potentially relevant measurements are scattered across a variety of scientific publications. In this paper we consider the viability of obtaining lunar composition data by leveraging LLMs to rapidly process a corpus of scientific publications. While leveraging LLMs to obtain knowledge from scientific documents is not new, this particular application presents interesting challenges due to the heterogeneity of lunar samples and the nuances involved in their characterization. Accuracy and uncertainty quantification are particularly crucial since many materials properties can be sensitive to small variations in composition. Our findings indicate that off-the-shelf LLMs are generally effective at extracting data from tables commonly found in these documents. However, there remains opportunity to further refine the data we extract in this initial approach; in particular, to capture fine-grained mineralogy information and to improve performance on more subtle/complex pieces of information.