Can Julia land on the Moon? On the development of a GNC simulation framework for the Argonaut lunar lander

Abstract

No, the Julia programming language cannot land on the Moon - but it can play a crucial role in designing and analysing the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) algorithms required for doing so. This paper presents the development of a lunar landing simulation framework implemented in Julia at the European Space Agency (ESA), within the Argonaut lunar lander programme. ATLAS (Argonaut Tools for Landing Analysis and Simulation) is a modular suite of analysis and simulation tools that cover the complete descent and landing phase of Argonaut, integrating high fidelity translational and rotational dynamics, varying mass properties, propellant sloshing, detailed sensor and actuator models, and flight-representative GNC algorithms within a multi-rate simulation environment. The framework is intended to bridge early-phase prototyping and large-scale Monte Carlo analysis within a single environment. This work evaluates the advantages and limitations of adopting Julia compared to established GNC development practices based on the MATLAB/Simulink ecosystem. The results show that Julia provides a powerful, flexible, and high-performance environment for agency-driven research, early-phase design studies, and computationally intensive closed-loop simulations enabling large-scale, parallelizable simulations and rapid design iteration cycles.