22/10/2026
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A small rover is alone on the Moon, with no signal and no idea of its position. All it has is a panoramic camera and an aerial map of the Moon’s surface. The lunar night is fast approaching… can you help the rover find its way before it’s too late?
In their Lunar X-view challenge launching on 1 November 2026, the European Space Agency’s Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) present the space community with a simple but dramatic scenario.
Dario Izzo, ACT’s scientific coordinator, sets the scene: “A rover is alone on the Moon, has no contact with Earth and is unsure of its position. Armed only with a ground-level panorama and an orbital map, it must work out where it is before the lunar night arrives.”
The challenge presented to the space community is to design an algorithm that can match a ground-level panoramic image (taken by the imaginary rover’s camera) with a lunar surface image (taken by a satellite orbiting the Moon) to pinpoint the rover’s exact location.
This is more than an academic exercise – when a rover knows exactly where it is, it can explore farther and reach scientific targets autonomously.
At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, researchers have already developed and tested a system that matches panoramas from the Perseverance Mars rover with orbital maps to correct accumulated positioning errors. ESA’s lunar challenge brings a similar navigation problem to the wider scientific community.
“The competition is run through the ACT’s Kelvins website, a portal dedicated to hosting public aerospace challenges. Just like the challenges we hosted in the past, it is open to space enthusiasts from all over the world,” adds Dario.
“The lesson we learned from our past competitions, such as the Pose Estimation challenges, ELOPE and the Collision Avoidance Challenge, is clear: hand the scientific community a hard problem and a scoreboard, and it will deliver in months what no single team could in years.”
Stefano Silvestrini from Politecnico di Milano helped design the competition. “I see it as an opportunity for lunar rovers to grow up: to leave the comfort of constant navigation support and learn to find their own way. Go and explore, without GPS or guidance from Earth,” he comments.
The Lunar X-view competition is run by ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team, the agency’s multidisciplinary think tank focusing on emerging technologies, in collaboration with the Institute of Science Tokyo, University of Adelaide and Politecnico di Milano.
The datasets and competition rules will be made available on 1 November 2026 through the competition website. Participation is free and open to everyone, and all submissions will be scored automatically on the platform.