Summary

The Digital Twins for Cislunar and Lunar Surface Ecosystem Development workshop series continues to convene a broad and diverse community focused on advancing the development and application of digital twins for cislunar and lunar surface ecosystems.

The vision is to create a digital engineering environment that enables secure data sharing, collaboration, and interoperability across government, industry, academia, and international partners. Built on open standards, this trusted engineering- and physics-based digital commons will support distributed ecosystem engineering by allowing stakeholders to share authoritative data, models, and analyses within a common framework.

Following several successful workshops focused on concept development and due diligence, the initiative is now transitioning into implementation. At the next workshop, hosted by Georgia Tech on September 1–2, 2026, the team will introduce the minimum viable product (MVP) for this digital commons approach, known as LUNAverse.

LUNAverse is envisioned as trusted, governed, AI-native digital infrastructure for the lunar and cislunar economy. It provides a Common Operational Simulation Environment where authoritative lunar data, machine-readable system models, persistent world representations, robotics, simulation, provenance, and human-governed AI agents operate together within a shared digital ecosystem.

Its purpose is to provide a common coordination layer through which government agencies, universities, commercial providers, investors, insurers, nonprofits, standards organizations, and governance bodies can collaborate from a shared digital operating environment.

LUNAverse is designed for coordination—not control. It is an open, governed environment that enables distributed participation without requiring a single owner, a single toolchain, or centralized management of the emerging lunar economy. Within this environment, lunar and cislunar systems can be designed, simulated, validated, coordinated, financed, insured, and governed before physical deployment, reducing risk while accelerating innovation and collaboration.

This capability is now possible because a wide range of enabling technologies, standards, data foundations, institutional initiatives, and AI capabilities have matured in parallel. These include NASA’s planetary data repositories as the Moon’s spatial memory, DARPA’s LUNA-10 architectural framework, SysML v2, OpenUSD, ROS/ROS 2, advanced simulation frameworks, provenance and evidence systems, digital governance models, and agentic AI workflows. While each of these technologies has evolved independently, they are now sufficiently mature to operate as an integrated ecosystem.

LUNAverse represents the point at which these capabilities converge. As lunar and cislunar activities transition from isolated missions to interconnected systems, shared digital coordination infrastructure is no longer optional, it is the foundational capability required to build a scalable, investable, insurable, and governable lunar and cislunar economy.

Please note: The elevator in the Weber building is currently out of service. Attendees will need to ascend one flight of stairs to reach the meeting space. If you need mobility assistance, please let us know in the registration

For registration questions:
techworkshops@aero.org

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