Underground and Off the Grid: How Moon Trades Tested Its Critical Minerals AI on a Simulated Lunar Mission
Table of Contents
Underground and Off the Grid . . . 1
No light. No GPS. No way out. . . . 1
Three experiments, four spacewalks . . . 2
Troubleshooting from 7,000 kilometres away . . . 2
What the data shows (so far) . . . 3
From analog mission to business case . . . 3
What's next . . . 4
For two weeks in a network of low light tunnels beneath the Swiss Alps, Toronto-based Moon Trades ran PEBBLE™, its AI terrain-intelligence platform, the same conditions its mining customers face on remote drill sites, and the ones future crews will face inside lunar lava tubes.
Between July 10 and 28, 2026, Moon Trades deployed its technology inside Asclepios VI, an analog lunar mission run out of the Sasso San Gottardo fortress in the Swiss Alps. The company's platform was sent into a network of underground tunnels standing in for the lava tubes that future lunar crews may one day need to explore.
Why underground? Because that's where the problem lives. Below the surface, there's no GPS, no satellite positioning to tell a machine where it is. That's the lunar lava-tube problem, and it's also the remote drill-site problem Moon Trades' mining customers face every day. A system that can navigate and characterize terrain without satellite positioning, in the dark, cut off from the outside world, works just as well on a remote Ontario exploration site as it will, one day, on the Moon. Asclepios VI was the clearest test yet.
A note on what "PEBBLE" is, because it matters to the story: PEBBLE is Moon Trades' AI terrain-intelligence platform a sensor stack (think LiDAR, hyperspectral imaging, IMUs, etc.) feeding onboard analysis software. This sensor stack can be mounted on any vehicle (aerial or ground-based). For this mission, PEBBLE was mounted on a rover called HiveR, built by Moon Trades' Berlin-based partners at Neurospace GmbH.
No light. No GPS. No way out.
The difficulty of Asclepios VI was not abstract. The tunnels are in constant darkness; the mission is specifically designed to study how crews perform under permanent low light. There is no satellite positioning underground, so the rover had to navigate without the GPS most autonomous systems lean on. The base is isolated, with the analog crew sealed off from the outside world and communication running only through Mission Control Centre (MCC). And the tunnels are cold and damp, hard on both hardware and people. These are the conditions that separate technology that works in a demo from technology that works in the field.
Moon Trades earned a spot on the mission through a competitive selection run by Asclepios, the largest student-led space analog program in the world, operated in partnership with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and was confirmed in early 2026 as a Principal Investigator cleared to run three experiments on-site. The months that followed were spent building the payload and fostering a strategic partnership with Neurospace GmbH.
Three experiments, four spacewalks
On-site, the Moon Trades team first trained the analog crew engineers and scientists from institutions including EPFL, ETH Zurich, Stanford, and RMIT to operate the HiveR rover and collect data with PEBBLE.
Over two expeditions and four Extravehicular Activities (EVAs), the crew successfully conducted three experiments, namely:
PATHFINDER subsurface tunnel mapping, simulating navigation inside lunar lava tubes.
MINERVA mineral detection using hyperspectral imaging and LiDAR.
PROSPECTOR full-scale mineral analysis and prospecting.
The first EVA, on July 14, ran roughly eight hours overnight, with the Moon Trades team at MCC from 8 pm until about 4 am guiding the crew through PATHFINDER. The team also supported additional EVAs including a MINERVA run on July 19, a second PATHFINDER run on July 21, and PROSPECTOR on July 23. By the second expedition, procedures refined during the first runs were producing faster, cleaner cycles underground.
Troubleshooting from 7,000 kilometres away
Mid-mission, PEBBLE™ briefly lost track of where it was. If this happened during a real lunar mission, this could make or break a spacewalk. The inertial measurement unit (IMU) is what tells the system how it is moving and oriented and underground, with no GPS to fall back on, losing it is serious. What happened next is the part Moon Trades considers the real result. With the hardware in Switzerland and the engineers in Toronto, the team diagnosed the problem remotely, working in step with MCC to recover the system without losing the EVA.
"Data means nothing without a system that survives contact with reality. Ours failed, 7,000 kilometres away, mid-mission. We fixed it, we documented it, and we built it back stronger. Every failure we survive gets written into how we build the next system, and the one after that. This is how you earn the right to call hardware flight-worthy, not by avoiding failure, but by engineering past it, every time." Wintta Ghebreiyesus, Founder & CEO
What the data shows (so far)
Moon Trades completed all four planned EVAs and ran all three experiments to completion, collecting LiDAR scans and hyperspectral readings across the tunnel network. As of publication, the sensor package is being returned to Toronto and full analysis of the dataset is still underway. The team is measuring the data against a defined set of targets related to mineral-detection accuracy against laboratory reference samples, rover positional error over 100-metre autonomous traverses, and a mission-completion rate.
From analog mission to business case
For a company whose core business is Earth-based mineral exploration, an analog lunar mission might look like a side project. Asclepios VI is anything but that. It advances two things at once. The first is terrestrial credibility: PEBBLE's sensor stack was pressure-tested in an extreme, GPS-denied environment the same conditions mining clients care about when they judge whether a technology meets the standards of operational ruggedization.
The second is a track record toward deep space: Moon Trades has its sights set on the European Space Agency's Argonaut lunar mission. A verifiable field deployment in exactly this kind of environment is a concrete credibility marker for that conversation and for investors weighing whether the company can deliver on its "mining funds the Moon" roadmap, in which revenue from finding critical minerals on Earth funds the path toward lunar resource utilization.
What's next
The sensor package is back in Toronto, where the team will complete the data analysis and carry the lessons into future deployments including the already-announced Asclepios VII mission and other analog opportunities.
"The Moon doesn't care about our timelines. So we test in caves, in mine shafts, anywhere the terrain refuses to be easy. And partly because that's our mission: to map and characterize the harshest, most remote places on Earth, and beyond." Wintta Ghebreiyesus, Founder & CEO
About Moon Trades
Moon Trades is a Toronto-based deep-tech company building PEBBLE, an AI terrain-analysis and geospatial-intelligence platform that helps mining companies identify drill targets faster, delivered as Exploration-as-a-Service. Its long-term roadmap extends the same technology toward space In-Situ Resource Utilization.
Acknowledgments
Moon Trades thanks the Asclepios VI Science Team and Mission Control, Asclepios Lab, partner Neurospace GmbH, the Trade Commissioner Service, and the analog astronauts who carried out the mission underground.
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