# Can Julia land on the Moon?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/can-julia-land-on-the-moon/142724>\
**Category:** Modelling & Simulations\
**Created:** [November 3, 2026, 9:35am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/can-julia-land-on-the-moon/142724 "2026-11-03T09:35:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![fracpl](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/fracpl/32/225005_2.png) [@fracpl](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/fracpl)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2026, 9:35am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/can-julia-land-on-the-moon/142724/1 "2026-11-03T09:35:03Z")

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In recent years, we’ve been working on developing a simulation framework tailored to our needs at the European Space Agency, in the context of the Argonaut lunar lander programme.

The result is ATLAS (Argonaut Tools for Landing Analysis and Simulation), a closed-loop, high-fidelity guidance, navigation, and control simulation framework developed entirely in Julia.

Last month, we had the opportunity to present some of our experience transitioning from MATLAB/Simulink to Julia for closed-loop simulations at the ESA GNC & ICATT Conference.

We’re now sharing this work in a paper that we hope will be of interest to the Julia community, particularly those working in control systems, GNC, and aerospace applications.

For those interested, you can find the paper here:

> **[Can Julia land on the Moon? On the development of a GNC simulation framework...](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03843)**
>
> 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...