The OASIS project page describes a system still in feasibility and preliminary-definition work, not hardware already operating on the Moon. ESA has selected Germany's OHB to lead those studies, and says a systems-requirement review began over the summer.
Power through the lunar night
A lunar night lasts almost 15 Earth days. During that stretch, darkness cuts off solar generation while temperatures can fall far enough to damage electrical equipment that lacks power or thermal protection.
ESA's baseline design pairs a service station and solar array with a separate battery. The array would collect energy during the lunar day, while the battery would provide survival power until sunlight returns. The target is at least 75 W of continuous power by day and 15 W at night.
The station would also offer one harness for payloads mounted on the lander and three deployable harnesses for instruments placed on the surface. By sharing communications and night-survival equipment, ESA says payload teams could avoid carrying separate versions of those systems for every experiment.
From Apollo's model to a European lunar network
ESA compares OASIS with NASA's Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, which connected instruments to a central station so they could keep transmitting after astronauts left. One of the first payloads planned for OASIS is ECHO, the Environment Characterisation and Heliophysics Observatory, which would study the lunar environment while testing the shared infrastructure.
Current plans place OASIS on an Argonaut lander launched by a four-booster Ariane 6. Communications and data relay would run through ESA's Moonlight system, beginning with Lunar Pathfinder. No launch date appears in the ESA announcement.
ESA describes OASIS as autonomous, modular and intended to become a recurring capability. Later versions could support payloads farther from a lander or provide a sheltered place for rovers to survive the lunar night. Those are future possibilities, while the present project remains in early design studies.
