By Savannah Bullard The stage is set for the finale of NASA’s Break the Ice Lunar Challenge. Conceived in 2020, Break the Ice tasked innovators with creating robotic systems that can traverse the volatile terrain of the Lunar South Pole. These robots must be able to dig into the Moon’s regolith – the dusty, icy “dirt” that makes up the lunar surface – and transport it to a secondary location for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) processing. If deployed on a NASA mission, these systems would operate in the permanently shadowed regions of the Moon, an area that receives no sunlight. These tech…