Argonaut Mission 1 Payloads Day
European Astronaut Center (EAC), Cologne, Germany
17 April 2026

Argonaut is one of the keystones of the “Terrae Novae” exploration capabilities and aims at enabling a substantial and sustained European presence on the surface of the Moon ensuring Europe fulfils its exploration objectives. 

Argonaut aims at providing an autonomous European capability for regular large robotic surface missions for an extended duration. This provides the possibility to conduct independent missions if required as well as being a significant and visible contribution to the international sustainable exploration of the lunar surface.

Argonaut as a campaign relies on a key transport capability, the Lunar Descent Element (LDE), that will be used to carry the “passenger”, that contains the payload such as e.g. logistics cargo, scientific cargo, infrastructure, rover.

The proposed Argonaut Mission 1 is focussed on demonstrating the end-to-end capability to land on the Moon’s south polar region (Near Side) with a target launch date in 2030. Argonaut Mission 1 also aims to demonstrate key European robotic exploration capabilities for the Lunar surface, by deploying and operating the following two payloads:

-       RSMA: Robotic Surface Mobility Asset

-       MRP: Moon Robotic Payload

The payload procurements will be issued as two Fixed Call for Proposals with Procurement for the Argonaut 1 Mission Payload Primes, respectively for the Argonaut 1 Robotic Surface Mobility Asset Mission (RSMA) Prime and Argonaut 1 Moon Robotic Payload  (MRP) Mission Prime.

The key objectives of the medium sized Robotic Surface Mobility Asset (RSMA) are to explore the area around the landing site, to support deployment of other payloads and host instruments and to test technologies for mobility and night survivability needed for future lunar exploration.

This surface mobility asset may consist of one or a combination of mobility technologies which are expected to have demonstrated a sufficiently high level of maturity early on in the development in order to be on time for integration with the mission. The surface mobility asset might include dexterity capabilities, leveraging on mature technologies.

The RSMA shall not exceed a mass allocation of 750kg (including egress system), it will operate independently from the Argonaut lander and will ideally be equipped with AI capabilities.

The Moon Robotic Payload (MRP) aims at demonstrating in-flight critical robotics technologies and capabilities that will be essential for future Lunar exploration missions. The MRP shall focus on dexterous robotic manipulation systems, with the following high level mission objectives:

a.    To demonstrate autonomous regolith sampling, lander inspection and payload deployment tasks.

b.    To demonstrate autonomous contact/robot collaboration tasks with closed-loop force-torque control.

The MRP shall not exceed a mass allocation of 200kg and may be complemented with mobility capability if within the resources available.