Ice-bearing Moon soil may be a different engineering material: a $1M NASA grant to find out
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What UT San Antonio reports: NASA is giving the university $1 million over two years, started in November 2026, through its M-STAR program, to study icy regolith, water ice mixed with lunar soil in and around permanently shadowed regions, and how it behaves when excavated and handled. The team will use a chamber that controls temperature, pressure, atmosphere, humidity and radiation to study how daily temperature cycling changes cohesion, flow, mechanical properties and water movement. Sub-teams will study low-temperature rheology and compaction (hardness and scoopability against ice amount) and the mechanical properties of individual grains under cryogenic conditions, and will develop sensors that survive the cold and measure the chemistry. Why it matters for materials: simulants made from crushed Earth rock are a common stand-in for lunar soil, but ice may change how a soil sticks, flows and resists digging, which would matter for excavation and drilling hardware. A UT San Antonio researcher says the mix may be hard to dig up; the grant exists to find out. Our take: this is a university announcement of a grant that has just started. It reports no results, no temperatures, ice fractions or strengths, and does not say whether real samples or a simulant will be used. As a baseline, our lunar simulant page lists JSC-1A with a bulk density of 1.5 to 1.7 g/cm3 (McKay et al., 1994) or 1.57 to 1.64 g/cm3 (Klosky et al., 2000) and a specific gravity of 2.9 (Alshibli and Hasan, 2009), all as cited on the ARES page, which does not say how compacted or moist the samples were. Ice-bearing equivalents, and the cohesion and hardness numbers the team says it will study, are what we would like to see. What we would watch: whether real samples or a simulant are used, and the first strength-against-ice-content curve. What ice fraction would you test first?