Who is landing where, and what is already there
One neutral registry of planned landing sites, hardware still in use and historic sites, with the zones published around them. Every entry links to its source. A landing rocket blasts regolith across hundreds of metres or more, so a new site should be checked against all of them.
Planned site
Active asset
Heritage site
Recommended boundary
Check a planned landing
Enter a landing point and a lander size. The report lists every registry entry within plume-ejecta reach, whether each sits in the main ejecta sheet, below it or behind terrain, and the zones the landing falls inside, with low, central and high estimates.
| Site | Kind | Location | Zones | Sensitive to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apollo 11 laser ranging retroreflector NASA · 1969-07-21 Passive corner-cube array still ranged from Earth for lunar laser ranging; dust coating lowers its return. | Active asset Laser retroreflector | 0.6734°N 23.4731°E measured |
| Optics and panels, Hardware |
| Apollo 14 laser ranging retroreflector NASA · 1971-02-05 Passive corner-cube array still ranged from Earth for lunar laser ranging; dust coating lowers its return. | Active asset Laser retroreflector | 3.6442°S 17.4786°W measured |
| Optics and panels, Hardware |
| Apollo 15 laser ranging retroreflector NASA · 1971-07-31 Passive corner-cube array still ranged from Earth for lunar laser ranging; dust coating lowers its return. | Active asset Laser retroreflector | 26.1334°N 3.6285°E measured |
| Optics and panels, Hardware |
| Blue Ghost Mission 1: Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector (NGLR-1) University of Maryland (on Firefly's Blue Ghost) · 2025-03-02 Earth-ranged 100 mm retroreflector; stations in France, Germany and New Mexico reported returns in March 2025. | Active asset Laser retroreflector | 18.5622°N 61.8102°E measured | none published | Optics and panels, Hardware |
| Chandrayaan-3 Vikram: NASA laser retroreflector array NASA (on ISRO's Vikram) · 2023-08-23 Miniature array ranged from orbit by LRO's laser altimeter (December 2023); PGDA lists a nominal deployment. | Active asset Laser retroreflector | 69.3735°S 32.3199°E measured | none published | Optics and panels, Hardware |
| Chang'e 4: Von Kármán crater (South Pole-Aitken basin, far side) CNSA · 2019-01-03 | Active asset Lander | 45.4562°S 177.5885°E measured | none published | Hardware, Optics and panels |
| Chang'e 6 lander: INRRI laser retroreflector INFN / ASI (on CNSA's Chang'e 6 lander) · 2024-06-01 Italian passive array on the lander deck, ranged from orbit by LRO's laser altimeter. | Active asset Laser retroreflector | 41.6383°S 153.9857°W measured | none published | Optics and panels, Hardware |
| Lunokhod 1 laser retroreflector Lavochkin design bureau (USSR) · 1970-11-17 Passive corner-cube array still ranged from Earth for lunar laser ranging; dust coating lowers its return. Ranged regularly again since its rediscovery in 2010. | Active asset Laser retroreflector | 38.3152°N 35.0080°W measured | none published | Optics and panels, Hardware |
| Lunokhod 2 laser retroreflector Lavochkin design bureau (USSR) · 1973-01-15 Passive corner-cube array still ranged from Earth for lunar laser ranging; dust coating lowers its return. | Active asset Laser retroreflector | 25.8323°N 30.9221°E measured | none published | Optics and panels, Hardware |
| SLIM: NASA laser retroreflector array NASA (on JAXA's SLIM) · 2024-01-19 Miniature array ranged from orbit by LRO's laser altimeter; PGDA lists an off-nominal deployment (SLIM landed inverted). | Active asset Laser retroreflector | 13.3155°S 25.2489°E measured | none published | Optics and panels, Hardware |
How we knowwhere the entries and zones come from
Sites. Past landings and impact sites use the coordinates in Mission Watch's curated mission records, most of them measured in LROC images (Wagner et al. 2017). Planned sites are the targets operators have published; where only a named region is public, the point is its approximate centre and the dashed circle its size. Laser retroreflectors and candidate regions are curated separately with their own sources.
Zones. A zone is shown only when someone published it. NASA's 2011 recommendations ask visitors to target touchdown no closer than 2.0 km to U.S. Government lander sites and 500 m to U.S. impact sites, with visit boundaries around Apollo 11 and 17; they apply to U.S. Government artifacts only, so they are drawn only there. The Artemis Accords (Section 11) ask signatories to announce safety zones, but no operator has published one with coordinates yet, so the registry has none. When one is published, it is added here with its source.
Plume reach. The conflict check uses the engine's plume-ejecta model, with its sources and limits in docs/science/plume-ejecta.md. Reach is given as low, central and high estimates because published work spans a wide range.