FusionLayer announced a new research partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT under the ADTLAS project - Advancing Digital Twin Infrastructures for Lunar Analogue Studies and Remote Collaboration.
As a co-sponsor of this ESA-OSIP initiative, FusionLayer will support research into how cloud-native IT services and autonomous digital infrastructure can be deployed to enable future lunar missions. The initiative will design and validate the foundational architecture needed to run applications, services, and network functions beyond Earth.
As part of the program, a key element in the project is the terrestrial LUNA analogue facility in Cologne – a unique testbed designed to replicate lunar surface conditions. In parallel, the team is also developing a high-fidelity digital twin of the lunar environment. Together, these real-world and virtual testbeds will enable engineers to develop a terrestrial digital twin of the lunar environment, being built near Cologne, Germany, to simulate, test, and automate mission-critical IT systems before deploying them to the Moon later this decade.
FusionLayer will sponsor the research and provide its Xverse automation and orchestration platform for evaluation and experimentation, enabling dynamic resource provisioning, address management, and cross-domain service orchestration across Earth-based and off-world environments.
Future lunar missions will rely not only on launch vehicles and habitats but also on dependable digital services to power robotics, scientific instruments, and autonomous operations. Unlike traditional cloud environments, lunar infrastructure must operate under high Earth latency, limited bandwidth, and minimal human oversight. These conditions require self-managing, edge-native systems that operate autonomously.
By validating solutions in an Earth-based digital twin first, the collaboration aims to test deployment workflows, model network behavior, and ensure reliability before actual lunar operations commence.
Juha Holkkola, CEO of FusionLayer, stated: “When people think about space missions, they think about rockets and hardware. But none of it works without digital infrastructure. Applications, networks, and services must be deployed and managed just as reliably on the Moon as they are in modern data centers. With Xverse, we’re demonstrating that autonomous orchestration can extend all the way to the lunar surface.”
Lionel Ferra, head of the European Space Agency’s XR Lab, added: “Future lunar exploration relies on robust, adaptable digital systems that can operate with minimal human intervention. Digital twins and automated service orchestration are essential for sustainable operations beyond Earth.”
Dr. Tommy Nilsson, the ADTLAS project lead from Fraunhofer FIT, elaborates further, stating that “by combining virtual simulations with real-world testbeds, we can evaluate and finetune complex lunar infrastructures, including prospective integration of Xverse with future lunar technologies, without incurring the massive costs that are traditionally associated with physical prototyping of new space systems.”
The ADTLAS project is part of ESA’s Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) and focuses on developing advanced digital-twin infrastructure for lunar-analogue environments. Further information about the project and its partners, including technical objectives and research scope, is available at the Fraunhofer FIT website.
FusionLayer will present its vision for autonomous, distributed digital infrastructure at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, showcasing how technologies created for extreme environments can benefit terrestrial telecom and enterprise networks.
Click here to know more about the ADTLAS project
