NASA's Moon Base Playbook: Probing Lava Tubes, Ice, and Hazards

NASA wants to build humanity's first lunar outpost, but before anything permanent goes up, the agency needs answers to three brutally practical questions: what can damage the hardware, where astronauts could shelter, and where the water ice actually is. Its moon base program just took a concrete step toward all three, selecting three new science payloads that will scout the lunar surface robotically before any crew follows.

The selections were made in late September 2026 through NASA's PRISM program — Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon — and the instruments will reach the surface on commercial landers through the agency's CLPS initiative. The agency even updated its announcement on October 2 to correct the payloads' full names, a small sign of how closely the details matter when the hardware is headed a quarter-million miles away.

Three New Scouts for the Moon Base Program

The first suite, LEMS-SP, is essentially a weather-and-hazard station for the lunar south pole. The autonomous Lunar Environment Monitoring Station will track falling micrometeoroids, measure volatile compounds drifting through the Moon's thin outer layer of gases, and listen for seismic events with a short-period seismometer. According to NASA, that baseline data will feed directly into the hazard assessments engineers need before permanent hardware — habitats, power stations, landing pads — goes in. The investigation is led by Dr. Mehdi Benna of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

The second is the lava-tube hunter. The Geophysical Instruments for Marius Lunar pit Investigation, known as GIMLI, will be deployed at the roughly 65-meter-wide opening in the Marius Hills region that scientists have long suspected is a skylight into a vast underground lava tube. The suite combines ground-penetrating radar, an active-source seismic system, a gravimeter, and cameras — the most direct surface-based investigation of any lunar pit ever attempted. If the suspected void is real, it could offer future astronauts ready-made protection from extreme temperatures, harmful radiation, and micrometeoroid bombardment, shifting habitat planning from "build the shielding" to "move into the cave." The investigation is led by Dr. Nathaniel Putzig of the Planetary Science Institute.

The third suite, DISCO, is the ice mapper. The Depth Imager with Spectral and Color Optics will make the first direct, on-the-ground measurements of ice hidden in lunar micro-cold traps — small permanently shadowed patches near the south pole where temperatures stay low enough for ice to survive. It will also study how rocket exhaust disturbs the lunar surface and how stable the ground is for driving, pinning down where ice exists and how much of it there is so the ice can eventually become water, air, and fuel. The investigation is led by Dr. Ariel Deutsch of NASA's Ames Research Center.

"NASA Science is building the ultimate interplanetary survival guide," said Nicky Fox, the agency's associate administrator for science, framing the program as a way to get science to the surface first so future crews arrive with the information and safety precautions already mapped. She added that the new selections would directly reduce risk for astronauts while advancing the agency's goals for a first lunar outpost as a proving ground for eventual Mars missions.

A Seismic First Since the Apollo Era

The lava-tube hunter carries a historical distinction: its active-source seismic system would be the first intentional generation of seismic waves on the lunar surface since the final Apollo landing mission in December 1972, when astronauts set off explosive charges as part of their experiments. That is more than half a century without the technique being used on another world, as reported by Tech Times — and GIMLI has to pull it off with robots, using hardware built by Honeybee Robotics, instead of astronauts with thumper devices.

The comparison with Earth is what makes the hunt exciting. Lava tubes are a familiar feature of basaltic volcanism on this planet — Hawaii and the Canary Islands have them, typically tens of meters wide. But the Moon's one-sixth gravity and the flood-basalt eruptions that built its maria could have produced tubes more than a kilometer wide, stable for billions of years, according to studies of orbital gravity data. Confirming one would let scientists apply everything known about terrestrial caves to lunar history, according to the mission's deputy principal investigator, PSI senior scientist Gareth Morgan.

Even a negative result would be useful. If the instruments show the pit is just a shallow collapse feature with no deeper structure, mission planners can cross one of the most promising candidates off the list — and the cameras would still capture the pit walls' exposed lava layers, a cross-section of volcanic history no orbiter can read at that resolution.

Why Moon Base Science Starts With Water and Shelter

The three payloads map onto the three questions a sustained human presence has to answer. DISCO hunts the water that becomes drinking supplies, breathing air, and rocket propellant. The lava-tube investigation hunts shelter that no launched shield could match: a confirmed tube would protect against radiation and temperature swings that run from around minus 173 degrees Celsius at lunar night to 127 degrees in full sunlight. LEMS-SP watches the environment itself, building the long-term record of impacts, quakes, and drifting volatiles that every future antenna, rover, and base station will have to survive.

Brad Bailey, who directs the exploration science strategy office behind the selections, framed each new investigation as strengthening the pipeline of science headed to the surface — with the Artemis and Moon Base programs expanding the frontier of lunar exploration and paving the way for astronaut missions to follow.

For readers tracking the new space race, the takeaway is that the Moon's next chapter is being written by surveyors, not settlers. The science goes first, the outpost comes later, and Mars waits beyond that. See the Science topic page for more, including a lunar magnetic fossil found in Chang'e-6 moon dust and lab tests on microbes surviving Enceladus-like ocean chemistry.

A half-century after the last astronauts left their footprints in the regolith, the Moon is about to get its first robotic survey crew — and the blueprints for living there start with what they find underground.