NASA Gives You Chance to Win $150,000: What Is the 'Lunar Grounding Challenge' and How Can You Participate?

How can we prevent astronauts from building up dangerous static electricity on the moon? To find a solution, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched a crowdsourcing initiative seeking innovative engineering ideas to solve the problem. NASA calls it the “Lunar Grounding Challenge.”

Winnings?

The space agency is offering prizes of up to $150,000 to whoever wins the “Lunar Grounding Challenge.”

What is the Lunar Grounding Challenge?

The US and NASA hope to land an American astronaut on the moon’s south pole in 2028 during the Artemis 4 or 5 missions. They fear the risks associated with “tribocharging” from walking on the lunar surface and “plasma charging” from the surrounding plasma generating an electrical charge on the spacesuit.

“This problem is greatly exacerbated when entering the lunar shadows and permanently shadowed regions (PSRs). In these dark zones, the suit can accumulate a substantial negative potential due to the lack of ambient ion flux and the absence of photoelectron emission to balance ambient electron collection,” explains NASA.

It added that the risk occurs when the astronaut returns to the spacecraft. “Because the lunar surface lacks a natural environmental mechanism to discharge the charge accumulated on the spacesuit, the astronaut can become a walking high-voltage capacitor,” says the US space agency.

He further explained that in a sunlit area, a stationary lander will have a slightly positive electrical potential. When a highly negatively charged astronaut approaches the vehicle, the extreme voltage difference during physical contact can trigger an electrostatic discharge (instant electric arc or spark).

“A rapid discharge from the astronaut to the lander risks degrading the suit’s vital layers, damaging the suit’s sensitive electronics, endangering the oxygen-rich environment inside the suit, and dangerous electrical shocks to the crew,” NASA says.

To find a solution to this problem, NASA is seeking innovative proposals for the Lunar Grounding Challenge.

NASA has asked industry partners for ideas that can help an astronaut avoid “becoming a walking high-voltage capacitor,” including problems such as arcing that could damage spacesuits, start fires in the spacecraft’s oxygen atmosphere or cause electric shocks.

This challenge seeks innovative solutions concepts for electrostatic discharge (ESD) mitigation that would safely and timely neutralize the astronaut at this extreme charge differential before the astronauts directly interact with the lander.

How and when to participate?

Registrations for the call began on October 5, and the deadline for submission is January 15, 2027. The link to submit an application can be found here:

What should the solution look like?

NASA says the proposed solution must minimize impacts on weight, volume and performance, and must be usable in the harsh conditions of the lunar surface.

Solutions must be less than 20 kg and size and performance constraints will be defined during challenge design.

The solution must support up to four Extravehicular Activities (EVAs) for 10 days of exposure to the lunar environment.

In addition, suspended lunar dust and heavy suit dust accumulation in these environments greatly lengthens the arc length, allowing sparks to jump across larger gaps than would be the case in a pure vacuum.

“Therefore, the solution must aim to prevent a sudden arc that could come into contact with the outer pressure garment (suit) or the lander,” the agency explained.

There are two phases to this call: 1) Concept Draft Submission and 2) Concept Refinement.

In its press release, NASA did not disclose a target date for when the technology would be available to astronauts, but the agency is planning a long-term lunar base for astronaut missions that would be largely ready to go by the 2030s, if plans go ahead.