Shedding Light on the Moon’s South Pole
There could be water on the Moon’s south pole, but landing on, researching, and navigating the treacherous landscape is a difficult task. This powerful simulation software allows engineers to explore potential challenges and variables throughout the mission.
Caty Fairclough, Media Relations, Synopsys
Cool Stuff
Aug 11, 2026
Aerospace
Beyond the daunting job of sending machines to the Moon, the terrain at the lunar south pole is particularly treacherous. Deep craters cover a great deal of the south pole, most of which are in constant darkness and incredibly cold. This makes landing, researching, and navigating an arduous task. Innovative technologies are needed to explore these regions of the Moon. Intuitive Machines is one of the companies stepping up to the challenge.
As part of its mission to provide services that open access to the Moon, Intuitive Machines developed technology, including its Nova-C class lunar lander, which enabled the company to facilitate the first commercial landing on the Moon and the first U.S. Moon landing in over 50 years. The company also developed the µNova Hopper (a propulsive drone the size of a minifridge), which can be deployed off of the team’s lander.
Jason Soloff, the company’s Lunar Data Network chief engineer, explains that the µNova Hopper was created to withstand the harsh conditions of the lunar south pole, to traverse its deep craters, and autonomously perform its mission while unable to communicate—then return to a ridge where it can share its knowledge.
Landing on the Moon’s south pole is only one of the many goals at Intuitive Machines. The company also aims to make the space economy more sustainable by using a methalox engine for its Nova-C lander. Methalox is a clean fuel made of liquid methane and oxygen. Reynolds emphasizes that if humanity is able to find water on the Moon’s south pole and use it to make fuel, “that’s the most pivotal and exciting science.”
The company also provides a validated cislunar communications solution, the Lunar Data Network (LDN), which supports near-space missions through its lunar operations center, globally commissioned dish network, and upcoming lunar data relay satellites. For these projects and technologies to succeed, the Intuitive Machines team needs to rigorously test all its designs and adapt them to the harsh environment of space. To do so, the team relies on Ansys simulation solutions, now part of the Synopsys portfolio.
Simulation Software
As a small startup with limited resources and staff, Intuitive Machines has found simulation to be instrumental to its success. “Simulation for us is a force multiplier,” says Soloff. With simulation, Soloff and his team can unlock their creativity to more quickly and easily test ways to solve problems. What-if scenarios, such as using different landing gear designs or gimbals, can be virtually tested, allowing engineers to easily learn how changing these variables affects important facets of their design, such as overall stresses, loads, and thermal performance.
Reynolds says the team uses Ansys simulation software to perform necessary analyses and tests throughout the entire mission. For example, in the initial design stage Soloff emphasizes how reducing mass is important for space technology. Other requirements include ensuring that machines can survive the forces of launch, as well as the extreme heat and cold experienced during the mission. Simulation allows the team to optimize for all these requirements. “Our analysis helps us design, thermally and power-wise, systems that can withstand extreme changes in temperature,” says Reynolds.
To perform these calculations, Intuitive Machines relied on Ansys Systems Tool it (STK) digital mission engineering software. The company used the software to model solar rays and determine when they would hit the lander and hopper and when no light would reach the machines. This is important knowledge that would be difficult to recreate by physically testing on Earth. Using simulation, the Intuitive Machines team could perform thermal analyses and see how heat moves through complex materials—a time consuming task to do by hand.
Part of the reason why Ansys simulation software is so useful to the team is because of its multiphysics capabilities. Intuitive Machines is working on “incredibly complex multiphysics problems that aren’t just an antenna pattern or a structural analysis of vibration or shock,” says Soloff. “It’s about integrating all these disciplines together through an integrated set of model and simulation tools that let us do what we need to do.”
Ensuring that its communications systems are functional and optimized is another key use of simulation for the team. Here, Intuitive Machines relied on Ansys simulation for everything from ensuring that antennas are oriented correctly to comparing the throughput and bandwidth generated by different ground stations and radios. For these analyses, the team once again turned to STK software to analyze how strong its communications are, how much data it can move, the predicted signal noise, the signal strength, and more. To perform complex electromagnetic analyses the company uses Ansys HFSS high-frequency electromagnetic simulation software and radio-frequency (RF) simulation to analyze and optimize antennas, radiation patterns, and electromagnetic radiation for communications.
These are not the only ways that Intuitive Machines uses simulation to improve its technologies either. Pictures are essential data points for the company, especially photos of the Moon’s south pole. As such, Reynolds says the team focused on using simulation software to ensure that it could successfully collect and transfer that photographic data during the mission. Using its simulations, the team was able to coordinate with communications providers to identify which services would be most ideal for the mission. “It’s a huge team effort to get something on the Moon,” Reynolds says. “So, being able to use simulation to prepare for a worldwide mission really helps. On outer space missions like those Intuitive Machines is performing, conditions such as light, temperatures, speed, radiation patterns, terrain, trajectories, and signal strength can change rapidly. STK software enables engineers to model these changes and account for the whole mission.”
Throughout all the different areas where it uses simulation software, the Intuitive Machines team finds that an increase in efficiency is a common denominator. Soloff says analyses that could take weeks to perform without simulation take only a matter of days when using Ansys software. Intuitive Machines can use validated Ansys models to find answers and make informed decisions quickly. This is even true for notoriously challenging calculations, such as accurately solving the three-body problem of how the Earth, Sun, and Moon all affect the mission.
With simulation, “we can go in, model everything, and have the confidence that we don’t need to spend another year refining our technologies,” says Reynolds. This saves precious time for startups like Intuitive Machines, making it more competitive and mission-ready in a shorter span of time.
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