Lunar Thermal Modeling (Temper)

Temper is our custom toolkit for evaluating the thermal and illumination conditions your hardware will encounter on the Moon. We combine lunar topography (through our Touchdown system), time-resolved Sun and Earth geometry, and regolith thermal modeling to produce site-specific environmental inputs for your team's thermal analysis and FEA.

Two square thermal maps, coarse observations and a fine terrain-driven model, with a common temperature ramp and 200 m scalebars. — Same 1 km area: observed Diviner summer climatology in native ~240 m bins at left, the Temper source-terrain model at 10 m column spacing at right, on a common summer mean brightness scale. The two have different temporal sampling; the finer posting is not an accuracy claim.

We calculate when sunlight reaches your site, how the surrounding terrain heats and cools, and the resulting radiative loads on individual hardware surfaces. Studies can cover candidate landing sites, rover waypoints, and specific mission dates, with terrain and landing-orientation uncertainty carried through to the outputs.

Two labeled time-series plots: environmental heat loads, and temperatures for two material choices. — Face-specific incident fluxes (left) and illustrative panel responses (right), for solar absorptivity 0.9 and 0.2, IR emissivity 0.9, areal heat capacity 7.2 kJ/(m² K), and 50 W/m² internal heat. These are example isolated nodes, not flight FEA.

What problem does this solve?

Your hardware experiences a changing thermal environment that depends on where it lands, which way it faces, and what surrounds it. A ridge can interrupt solar power. Sunlit terrain can add infrared heat to a radiator. Two locations with similar average illumination can have very different stretches of continuous darkness.

These differences affect heater and battery requirements, radiator placement, and when hardware can safely operate. Average temperatures and illumination percentages alone do not capture the conditions that drive those decisions.

Temper provides the time histories and environmental boundary conditions needed to evaluate those tradeoffs in your hardware model.

What we deliver

Illumination and darkness timelines: Sun visibility, incident solar flux, and continuous shadow periods over the mission window, supporting solar-power and energy-storage studies.
Surface thermal environments: Regolith temperature histories, temperature extremes, and maps for comparing sites and rover waypoints.
Hardware-specific radiative loads: Direct sunlight, terrain-reflected sunlight, and terrain infrared projected onto oriented panels or patches of a supplied vehicle mesh, including vehicle shadowing.
Thermal-model inputs: Time-dependent heat-flux and effective radiative-sink temperature files, with documented units, coordinate frames, and assumptions for integration into your analysis workflow.
Communications visibility: Terrain-limited Earth or selected ground-station line-of-sight windows to support communications planning.
Sensitivity studies: Comparisons across terrain scenarios and landing orientations to identify which environmental assumptions most affect your design.

Three spacecraft views labeled Day 14.5, Day 18.5 and Day 27.0, colored by radiative load, with a shared color scale. — 805 receiver patches on NASA reference lunar module geometry, one terrain member at zero yaw, 14.5 / 18.5 / 27 days after 1 November 2027. Color is incident radiative flux, not hardware temperature; gray faces are excluded interior groups.

Adapting it to your work

Send us your candidate sites, mission dates, and hardware geometry or panel orientations. We'll scope the environmental analysis and deliverables around the decisions your team needs to make.