An open-source ROS 2 + Gazebo platform for simulating NASA's Artemis lunar missions — terrain, illumination, robotics, and beyond.

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One command — artemis liftoff — boots the mission-control dashboard, Gazebo, and the mission manager in a single tmux session

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Overview

Artemis Mission Simulator is a plug-and-play simulation playground for researchers and engineers working on space robotics for the Artemis programme. The goal is two-fold: simulate the lunar environment as faithfully as possible, and provide a ready-to-use testing ground for rovers, drones, humanoids, and other systems intended for lunar surface operations.

The whole stack is driven by a single command-line tool, artemis: artemis liftoff brings up a live terminal mission-control dashboard, the Gazebo simulation, and the mission manager together, each in its own pane of a dedicated tmux session.

Milestone 1 — Lunar Environment (in progress)

• Real terrain from NASA PGDA-78 LRO elevation data for Artemis south-pole landing sites
• Accurate solar illumination and permanently shadowed regions via ephemeris data
• Procedural surface texturing for VO and SLAM testing

Upcoming milestones

• Moonfall drone simulation
• Lunar Terrain Vehicles (LTVs) and rovers
• Lunar base environment

Packages

Package	Description
artemis_mission_launcher	The artemis command-line tool, the terminal mission-control dashboard, and the Gazebo world launch files
artemis_mission_manager	Mission-level orchestration; publishes latched site metadata on /mission/site_metadata
artemis_mission_interfaces	ROS 2 message definitions for mission-level information (e.g. SiteMetadata)
artemis_assets	Pre-built Gazebo terrain models for the supported sites (and future props/robots)
lunar_terrain_exporter	CLI tool for generating Gazebo SDF terrain models from NASA PGDA-78 south-pole DEMs

Setup

Prerequisites

• Docker
• X11 display server (Linux) or XQuartz (macOS)
• NVIDIA GPU + nvidia-container-toolkit

Option A — Docker scripts

# Build the image
./docker/build.sh

# Launch the container (auto-detects NVIDIA GPU, mounts workspace)
./docker/run.sh

# Inside the container
colcon build --symlink-install
source install/setup.bash

Option B — VS Code Devcontainer

Requires the Dev Containers extension.

1. Open the repo in VS Code.
2. Run Dev Containers: Reopen in Container.
3. Build from the terminal:

colcon build --symlink-install
source install/setup.bash

NVIDIA GPU passthrough is opt-in — uncomment the --gpus=all lines in .devcontainer/devcontainer.json.

Both flows map your host UID/GID into the container so mounted files are always owned by your host user. Build artifacts persist across restarts in named Docker volumes. To wipe them after an image rebuild:

docker volume rm artemis-build artemis-install artemis-log

Mission Control — the artemis CLI

Once the workspace is built and sourced, a single command launches a full mission:

artemis liftoff --site shackleton_rim

The mission-control window — mission clock, site overview, and host telemetry over a starfield

artemis liftoff creates a tmux session named artemis with one window per stack and attaches you to it:

Window	What it runs
mission-control	A live terminal dashboard — mission clock, site overview, and host telemetry, over a starfield
simulation	The Gazebo world for the selected site (lunar_world.launch.py)
mission_manager	Publishes latched site metadata on /mission/site_metadata

Options

Flag	Description
--site <name>	Mission site (default: empty_lunar). See sites below.
--epoch <when>	Mission UTC epoch: now, now+<N>{s,m,h,d}, YYYY-MM-DD, or YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ (default: now)
-d, --detached	Launch in the background instead of attaching to the tmux session
--no-home	Skip the mission-control dashboard

Available sites: empty_lunar, shackleton_rim, de_gerlache_rim, peak_near_shackleton, connecting_ridge

Shutting down — from the attached session press Ctrl-C to shut the mission down cleanly. If you launched with --detached:

tmux attach -t artemis        # re-attach
tmux kill-session -t artemis  # force-stop

Launching the simulation alone

To bring up only the Gazebo world without the full mission stack:

ros2 launch artemis_mission_launcher lunar_world.launch.py site:=shackleton_rim

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.

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