Subsurface Habitat Siting From Sinuous Rille Sound Quilts

Marius Hills hosts a 48-kilometer sinuous rille with a ~65-meter-wide skylight hole that SELENE and LRO radar confirmed leads to an intact lava tube. EchoQuilt stitches multi-kilometer rille geometry into habitat-siting maps that Artemis architects can commit to.

An Artemis architect working group studying subsurface habitat siting narrowed to three candidate lunar sinuous rilles but hit a wall during Phase II review. The team had orbital imagery from LROC, radar penetration data from SELENE/Kaguya, and thermal maps from Diviner, but no continuous interior geometry for any of the three candidates. Reviewers asked which specific 50-meter-long tube segment the team proposed pressurizing. The team could not answer because their data set resolved 10-km rille averages, not habitat-scale segments, and the Phase II gate pushed back by a full funding cycle while the team scoped an additional radar-sounder mission.