HWBRIEF
Lunar Grounding Challenge targets the static charge a spacesuit builds at the South Pole, especially inside permanently shadowed craters, before a moonwalker arcs into the lander.
A moonwalker's suit can build up enough static charge at the lunar South Pole to arc into the lander the moment they touch it. The arc can degrade suit layers, damage suit electronics, threaten the oxygen-rich cabin, or shock the crew. NASA opened the Lunar Grounding Challenge on October 5, 2026 to defuse that hazard with a public engineering prize.
Walking on regolith charges the suit through friction, and the ambient plasma at the South Pole adds more. The effect is severely compounded inside Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs), craters that have not seen direct sunlight in billions of years. Without sunlight to knock electrons off the surface, and without an ion flux to balance the charge, a suited astronaut becomes a walking, high-voltage capacitor at a substantial negative potential. The Moon has no atmosphere to bleed it off. A sunlit lander sits slightly positive, so contact becomes the moment an electrostatic discharge (an instantaneous arc) can jump.
NASA is framing the fix as a separable design problem: a way to neutralize the astronaut safely under that voltage differential before they touch the vehicle. The challenge runs through January 15, 2027 and offers up to $150,000 in prizes, hosted through the NASA Tournament Lab.