The European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team has announced a competition called Lunar X-view, launching on 1 November 2026, that asks the space community to help an imagined lunar rover work out where it is. In the scenario described by the agency, a small rover is alone on the Moon with no signal and no knowledge of its position, equipped only with a panoramic camera and an aerial map of the lunar surface.

The task is to design an algorithm that matches a ground-level panoramic image with a satellite image of the lunar surface to determine the rover's exact location, with the approaching lunar night adding urgency. According to ESA, the problem mirrors work already tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where researchers matched panoramas from the Perseverance Mars rover with orbital maps to correct positioning errors.

ACT scientific coordinator Dario Izzo said past competitions have shown that giving the scientific community a hard problem and a scoreboard can produce rapid results. The competition is run through the team's Kelvins platform in collaboration with the Institute of Science Tokyo, University of Adelaide and Politecnico di Milano. Datasets and rules will be published on 1 November 2026, and participation is free and open to everyone, with entries scored automatically.