Researchers at Berkeley Lab, working with teams from the Universities of Maryland and Hawaii, have built a computational model that predicts how the moon’s subsurface responds to seismic waves depending on its composition. The findings, published in Science Advances, confirm that seismic signatures differ between icy and dry lunar rock.
NASA’s Artemis program requires water for long-term lunar missions, as carrying enough supplies from Earth is unfeasible. Recent studies indicate that water resources on the moon are far more substantial than believed during the Apollo era, but scientists must pinpoint where concentrated frozen deposits lie beneath the surface.
Experimental testing
To measure rock physics in the moon’s subzero vacuum environment, Harrison Lisabeth, a research scientist at Berkeley Lab, helped build a 15-inch cryogenic vacuum chamber called the Frozen Regolith Observation and Sublimation Testbed (FROST). Lisabeth designed the chamber alongside Dula Parkinson and Harold Barnard using 2023 funding from Berkeley Lab’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program. Attached to an Advanced Light Source beamline for X-ray microtomography, FROST allows researchers to examine how microscopic rock structures deform.
For the published study, the team tested simulated regolith developed by NASA’s Johnson Space Center inside the chamber. University of Hawaii researcher Matthew Siegler used satellite observations to model where ice deposits remain stable on geological timescales, while University of Maryland researcher Nicholas Schmerr created a seismic simulation model. Combining these datasets allows geophysicists to model subsurface movements down to roughly 800 meters depth.
Rover integration
Planned exploration rovers carry percussive drills that generate seismic waves during operation. The team designed the model to interpret data from NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) at the lunar south pole, where the vehicle will use navigational accelerometers as seismic sensors. While VIPER’s standard instruments assess ice within the top meter of soil, seismic wave analysis can detect frozen deposits much deeper.
Lisabeth, Schmerr, and Siegler conduct this research through the NASA-funded Geophysical Exploration of the Dynamics and Evolution of the Solar System project. In addition to lunar studies, scientists have used the FROST chamber to study glacier dynamics on Earth along with water transport and thermal properties in regolith.
