UT San Antonio Wins $1 Million NASA Award for Two-Year Study of Icy Lunar Soil
UT San Antonio, in San Antonio, Texas, announced on November 5 that a new project led by the university has won $1 million from NASA to study, over two years, how icy lunar soil, or regolith, behaves in the extreme cold of the Moon's permanently shadowed regions, mainly in craters around the poles. The findings could inform methods for extracting, transporting and processing resources on the Moon. The project began this month and is funded 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.
The project, titled Characterizing Physical and Mechanical Properties of Regolith at Cryogenic Conditions using the Multi-Planetary Surface Simulator (MPS2), will build the MPS2 facility at the university's Laboratory for Experimental and Aqueous Planetology (LEAP). The simulator will control temperature, pressure, atmospheric composition, humidity and radiation to reproduce conditions on the Moon and other planetary bodies. Kaushik Mitra, an assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the project's principal investigator, said 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. The team will study how daily temperature cycling affects the cohesion, flow behavior and mechanical properties of icy regolith, and how the water it contains moves and changes chemically. Four UT San Antonio laboratories are taking part, with researchers from the Southwest Research Institute as co-investigators.
Training is built into the award. Each summer, the project will fund three UT San Antonio students for 10 weeks of research at a NASA center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Johnson Space Center or the Goddard Space Flight Center, with selection in November and December and paid internships starting in spring 2027. On campus, the project will support four undergraduate researchers per semester, one master's student for two years and a postdoctoral researcher. Each year it will also fund paid summer research places for four students from local community colleges and two high school students from the Southwest Independent School District.
Source: UT San Antonio
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：阿波罗11号宇航员 Buzz Aldrin 站在月球表面（1969年），月球土壤研究资料图。摄影 Neil A. Armstrong／NASA，公共领域，来源 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the Moon in 1969 (representative image for lunar soil research). Photo by Neil A. Armstrong / NASA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
