Turns out there are more places to explore on the moon than just the south pole. As NASA steadily advances toward establishing a long-term presence on Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor through the Artemis program, an advisory panel has recommended that future astronauts look far beyond the lunar south pole for their next great scientific adventures. Among their most striking proposals is a mission to return to the historic Apollo 15 landing site to retrieve half-century-old hardware and, remarkably, bags of human waste left behind by the Apollo astronauts in 1971.
The proposal was put forward on Wednesday by a dedicated committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. At NASA’s request, the panel evaluated potential moon-landing sites outside of the lunar south pole, where the space agency currently intends to construct its primary long-term moon base. In a comprehensive new report, the committee highlighted four compelling non-polar destinations—Bhabha Crater, Mons Hadley, Orientale Basin, and Aristarchus Plateau—where future Artemis crews should collect samples, make critical observations, and conduct specialized experiments.
The committee’s strategy prioritizes locations that would uniquely benefit from the presence of human explorers rather than uncrewed robotic missions alone. While NASA’s main base at the south pole remains the cornerstone of current planning, these supplementary locations would offer invaluable scientific opportunities that cannot be duplicated at the poles, which notably lack volcanic terrain and specific radioactive metals like uranium and thorium.
To explore these diverse regions safely and efficiently, the panel outlined a series of targeted "sorties"—short, one-time visits by a pair of astronauts. Under this proposed framework, two crew members would land in the vicinity of a scientifically rich target and conduct one to four moonwalks within a limited radius of their lander.
The most unconventional part of the committee’s vision focuses on the Mons Hadley landing site, where Apollo 15 commander David Scott and lunar module pilot James Irwin touched down more than fifty years ago. Under the panel’s recommendation, a future crew would land just north of the original site at Mons Hadley, maintaining a safe distance to avoid damaging the historic location. From there, the astronauts would walk over to inspect the lunar rover, the lander base, various scientific instruments, and the power systems left behind by the 1971 mission.
Over the decades, that abandoned equipment has endured extreme environmental pressures, including relentless space radiation and dramatic, repeated cycles of extreme heating and cooling as lunar days give way to freezing nights. Bringing pieces of this hardware back to Earth would grant scientists a rare opportunity to study how the harsh lunar environment impacts human-made materials over long periods.
Even more intriguingly, the panel suggests that recovering and analyzing the human waste—including urine and feces—left in bags on the lunar surface could yield vital biomedical insights. Researchers in Earth laboratories could examine how biological material changes over decades of exposure to space conditions and determine whether it has had any localized impact on the surrounding lunar environment.
Dan Dumbacher, co-chairperson of the National Academies committee, emphasized the profound practical value of such an investigation. He noted that studying how organic and mechanical materials degrade on the moon would provide foundational information for how engineers must design systems for future lunar bases and anything else humans decide to take to the surface of the moon.
The committee’s top overall pick for a new landing site is Bhabha Crater, which is situated inside what may be the solar system’s largest and oldest impact basin. Rocks collected from this region could finally pin down the exact timeline of that ancient, massive impact. Located on the far side of the moon, Bhabha Crater would also require an Artemis crew to travel farther from Earth than any humans have ever ventured before, giving NASA an unprecedented opportunity to test how astronauts cope with extreme isolation.
Furthermore, the far-side location makes Bhabha Crater a premier destination for astronomy. James Day, the other co-chairperson of the committee, highlighted the unique advantages of the region. He pointed out that it sits inside the natural "quiet zone" on the far side of the moon, perfectly shielded from the radio frequency noise produced by human activity on Earth. This exceptional radio silence would provide scientists with pristine conditions to study the very early universe, long before the first stars or galaxies had formed.
Another recommended destination is the Orientale Basin, which stands as the moon’s youngest large basin, dating back roughly 3.8 billion years. During a mission to Orientale, astronauts would collect deep-crust boulders that could definitively answer whether the moon was once entirely molten in its youth. The crew would also be tasked with setting up a dedicated detector for gravitational waves—subtle ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Committee leaders explained that such an instrument could provide early warnings months before distant neutron stars collide across the universe.
The fourth recommended site is the Aristarchus Plateau, an ambitious Apollo-era destination that NASA ultimately never reached. Spanning about 60 miles, the plateau holds rich volcanic deposits that researchers believe may contain trapped water. Crews landing at this expansive site would stand to gain the most from a simple, open-cab rover that the committee has urged NASA to develop.
To support these ambitious sorties, the National Academies panel issued several broader technical and logistical recommendations for NASA. The committee advised the space agency to continue mapping the moon in high detail from lunar orbit, to develop specialized scientific instruments capable of surviving and operating through the bitterly cold lunar night, and to establish a robust communications architecture that ensures crews remain in constant contact with Earth, even when operating on the far side of the moon.
The committee’s proposed missions would rely on a "walkback" limit—a standard established long ago by NASA that restricts astronauts to exploring within a specific distance of their lander. However, the panel suggested that NASA should look into expanding this boundary to allow crews to cover more ground safely during their brief surface stays.
Ultimately, the timing, frequency, and order of these exploratory missions will be decided by NASA leadership as the Artemis program evolves beyond its initial base-building phases at the south pole. As James Day remarked, exploring all four of these scientifically diverse sites will yield profound knowledge not just of Earth’s closest neighbor, but of the wider solar system and human capabilities in space.
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