NASA’s Moon battery survives minus 170C but needs a heater
Drills in shadowed craters, rovers and astronauts’ emergency power packs are among the possible uses, NASA says.
A solid-state battery NASA is developing for the Moon was undamaged after exposure to minus 170C but cannot work at that temperature and would need heaters to restart, the US space agency has said.
The battery is part of a project called Solid Power for Extreme Environment Adaptability and Resilience in Space (SPEARS), led from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. NASA says it could provide an important tool to help power a sustained human presence on the Moon through the Artemis campaign.
Conventional lithium-ion batteries, such as those in phones and laptops, rely on liquid electrolytes, which would freeze at the Moon’s night-time temperatures, potentially damaging the battery, and evaporate in the vacuum of space.
SPEARS batteries replace the liquid with a solid ceramic- or polymer-based material. In recent thermal vacuum tests at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, small prototype cells operated well up to 80C and down to minus 60C. With slightly reduced performance, they worked down to minus 80C.
“We proved for the first time that these cells can work down to minus 80 degrees Celsius,” said Yi Lin, SPEARS testing and research lead at NASA Langley. Lin also expressed confidence that the team can improve performance and maybe even expand that range in coming years.
Surviving the cold, then warming up
After exposure to temperatures from 100C down to minus 170C, the batteries did not sustain damage. Not even solid-state batteries will function at a temperature as low as minus 170C, the article says, but because solid electrolytes do not freeze like a liquid, they can survive it.
Small heaters would bring the cells back to operating temperature, and they would not have to be kept warm all the time, which NASA says could reduce the need for heavy thermal management systems in spacecraft and lunar habitats.
NASA gives the night-time temperature at the Moon’s south pole as minus 200C, which is 30 degrees colder than the lowest exposure in the tests it describes. The article does not say whether the cells have been tested that cold.
Possible uses include drills that must work in shadowed lunar craters, rovers and emergency power packs for astronauts. Lin said the team can change the chemistry by using different electrode materials to “tune for energy, tune for power, tune for durability, depending on the application.”
The technology could also be used on Earth, where Ji Su, a polymer materials scientist and task lead at NASA Langley, called the potential market for solid-state batteries “very broad.”
The project began in 2026 and is set to focus on technology development in its first stages before potentially shifting towards commercial collaboration. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California is developing flight hardware to prepare the batteries for spaceflight. The article does not say when they might be tested in space.
