Image: NASA
From the giant Leviathan telescope at Birr Castle to Ireland's first satellite and its signing of the Artemis Accords in 2026, the story of Ireland and the Moon goes back further than you might think.
Ireland has never launched a rocket of its own, yet few small countries have looked at the Moon for longer or more closely. From a Victorian telescope in the Midlands to a student-built satellite and, this year, a seat at the table for the next era of lunar exploration, the island's story with the Moon runs deeper than most people realise.
The Leviathan of Parsonstown
In 1845 William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, finished building a telescope on his estate at Birr Castle in County Offaly. Known as the Leviathan of Parsonstown, its mirror was 72 inches (1.83 metres) across, almost 3 tonnes of polished speculum metal, and it remained the largest telescope in the world until 1917.
The Leviathan is best remembered for revealing the spiral shape of what we now call the Whirlpool Galaxy. But the family's interest also turned to our nearest neighbour. Laurence Parsons, the 4th Earl, built special apparatus at Birr to measure the heat given off by the Moon, studying how it changed with the lunar phases and how much of it the atmosphere absorbed. His results were presented to the Royal Society in the 1873 Bakerian Lecture, one of the earliest serious attempts to take the Moon's temperature.
The telescope fell silent around 1890, but it was rebuilt in the late 1990s and a working mirror was fitted in 1999. Today it is one of the most striking pieces of astronomical history anywhere in Europe.
Dunsink and a lost piece of the Moon
On the edge of Dublin sits Dunsink Observatory, founded in 1785 and once home to Sir William Rowan Hamilton. Until 1916, Ireland even kept its own time, Dublin Mean Time, set by the clocks at Dunsink.
Dunsink also features in one of the stranger footnotes of the Apollo era. After Apollo 11, President Nixon gave every country a small display holding four rice-sized grains of Moon dust alongside a national flag that had flown to the Moon and back. Ireland's display was kept at Dunsink, and in 1977 a fire swept through the observatory. The debris was cleared away and taken to a landfill at Finglas, and Ireland's piece of the Moon went with it. It is still thought to be buried there today.
In 2025 Dunsink, Birr Castle and Armagh Observatory were added together to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List as the Irish Historic Astronomical Observatories, a first step towards World Heritage status.
A founding member of Europe's space agency
Ireland was one of the founding members of the European Space Agency in 1975, and that membership has quietly shaped a growing space industry. Irish companies and universities now build parts, software and instruments that fly on European missions, supported by the government's National Space Strategy for Enterprise.
Back at Birr Castle, the past and future now sit side by side. In 2017 a modern radio telescope, I-LOFAR, was built in the castle grounds. It is the westernmost station in the European LOFAR network, which stretches as far east as Latvia, and listens to the sky at low radio frequencies a short walk from the Leviathan.
EIRSAT-1: Ireland's first satellite
On 1 December 2023 a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from California carrying EIRSAT-1, a shoebox-sized satellite built by students and staff at University College Dublin. When it reached orbit, it became Ireland's first ever satellite.
EIRSAT-1 carried three Irish experiments: a compact gamma-ray detector using a sensor developed in County Cork, a test of protective coatings first made for ESA's Solar Orbiter, and a new way of steering a spacecraft using the Earth's magnetic field. In August 2024 its gamma-ray detector picked up two gamma-ray bursts within just over an hour of each other, one from the death of a massive star and one from the rarer collision of two neutron stars.
After 643 days in space, EIRSAT-1 burned up in the atmosphere on 4 September 2025. It was a small mission, but it proved Ireland could design, build and fly its own spacecraft.
Signing up for the Moon
On 4 May 2026 Ireland signed the Artemis Accords at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Peter Burke, the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, signed on behalf of the government, on the same day as Malta. With those two signatures, every member state of the European Space Agency had now endorsed the Accords.
The Artemis Accords are a set of principles for exploring the Moon, Mars and beyond peacefully and in the open. Signatories agree to share scientific data, help astronauts in distress, limit space debris and protect historic sites such as the Apollo landing zones. They also set out how lunar resources might be used in line with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
For Ireland, signing opens the door to taking part in the Artemis programme, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface. That could mean Irish technology, Irish science and, one day perhaps, Irish people playing a part in humanity's return to the Moon.
A long view of the Moon
It is a remarkable arc. A family in Offaly once tried to measure the warmth of moonlight with handmade instruments. Today Irish engineers build hardware for orbit, and the government has signed up to the rules that will shape the first permanent human presence on the Moon. Whatever happens next, Ireland has been watching the Moon for a very long time.
