A new NASA-funded project led by UT San Antonio will examine how icy lunar soil, or regolith, behaves in the extreme cold found in the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions, primarily found in craters around the poles. The findings could help inform methods for extracting, transporting and processing resources on the Moon.
The work addresses a critical challenge for future missions that rely on in-situ resource utilization, or using resources found on the Moon rather than transporting them from Earth. Water ice in permanently shadowed regions is a potentially important resource, but researchers need to better understand how icy regolith will respond to excavation and handling.
The project, “Characterizing Physical and Mechanical Properties of Regolith at Cryogenic Conditions using the Multi-Planetary Surface Simulator (MPS2),” began this month and will receive $1 million over two years through NASA’s MUREP Space Technology Artemis Research (M-STAR) program, which supports research and workforce development at minority-serving institutions. NASA selected only 12 institutions nationwide for the highly competitive award.
The Multi-Planetary Surface Simulator (MPS2) will be developed and housed in UT San Antonio’s Laboratory for Experimental and Aqueous Planetology (LEAP). The facility will simulate environmental conditions found on the Moon and other planetary bodies by controlling temperature, pressure, atmospheric composition, humidity and radiation. This allows researchers to study how planetary materials respond to extreme conditions over time.
“Establishing how water ice interacts with lunar soil under extreme cryogenic conditions is fundamental to building scalable in-situ resource utilization systems for the Artemis era,” said Kaushik Mitra, an assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UT San Antonio and the project’s principal investigator. “Through the MPS2 facility, we will be generating essential physical and electrochemical data that NASA and industry need to extract critical surface resources.”
Researchers will use the MPS2 to study icy regolith outside, near and within permanently shadowed regions. The team will investigate how daily temperature cycling affects the soil’s cohesion, flow behavior and mechanical properties, as well as the movement and chemistry of the water it contains.
“The Artemis mission aims to establish a Moon base at the lunar South Pole because we have good evidence that water ice is there,” said Alan Whittington, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “The ice will be mixed with lunar soil, or regolith, and the combination may be very hard to dig up for processing and extraction of liquid water. In the HAMSTER lab, we will study how the hardness and ‘scoopability’ of lunar regolith changes with different amounts of water ice holding it together.”
The project brings together four UT San Antonio research laboratories with complementary expertise.
Mitra’s LEAP laboratory will lead planetary simulation, daily-cycle and excavation testing in the MPS2 chamber, while the HAMSTER lab, led by Whittington, will conduct low-temperature rheology and compaction testing. The PMCHEF lab, led by Xinting Yu, assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy, will study the mechanical properties of individual grains under cryogenic conditions. The Energy Electrochemistry and Electrochemical Engineering Enterprise (e5) led by Shrihari Sankarasubramanian, assistant professor of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering, will develop sensors that can survive the extreme cold of the Moon and be used to measure the chemical properties of its icy regolith.
“We will use the MPS2 chamber that can mimic conditions found on a variety of extraterrestrial bodies and develop custom instruments that can survive these extreme conditions and perform measurements relevant to the Moon and the Artemis mission,” said Sankarasubramanian.
The team is also collaborating with Ana Stevanovic, director of the Kleberg Advanced Microscopy Center, and Wendell Griffith, special research associate in the Department of Chemistry. Kelly Miller and Ryan Blase, lead scientists at the Southwest Research Institute, serve as co-investigators.
Training the next generation of space researchers
“This award directly integrates UT San Antonio students, local community college scholars, and high school interns into hands-on aerospace research alongside NASA centers,” Mitra said. “Rather than just learning about space exploration in the classroom, our students will work at the cutting edge of lunar science, contributing real experimental data that directly supports NASA’s exploration and In-Situ Resource Utilization goals for the Artemis era.”
Each summer, the project will fund three UT San Antonio students for 10 weeks of research at one of three NASA centers: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Johnson Space Center, and the Goddard Space Flight Center. Matt Cannon, associate professor of instruction in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, will help select the students in November and December to start working as paid interns in Spring 2027.
On campus, the project will support four undergraduate researchers per semester, one M.S. Geosciences student for two years and a postdoctoral researcher. Each year, the project will also fund paid summer research opportunities for four students from local community colleges, including St. Philip’s College and San Antonio College, and two high school students from Southwest Independent School District.
By combining planetary science, engineering, physics and geochemistry with hands-on research opportunities, the project will help prepare students for careers in the growing space economy in San Antonio and beyond.