Lunar IceCube is a NASA nanosatellite orbiter mission that was intended to prospect, locate, and estimate amount and composition of water ice deposits on the Moon for future exploitation.

[5] It was selected in April 2015 by NASA's NextSTEP program (Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships) and awarded a contract worth up to US$7.9 million for further development.

Thus, the science goals were to investigate the distribution of water and other volatiles, as a function of time of day, latitude, and lunar soil composition.

[4] Lunar IceCube carried a Broadband InfraRed Compact High Resolution Exploration Spectrometer (BIRCHES) instrument, developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

[2][9] It utilizes a solid iodine propellant and an inductively-coupled plasma system that produces 1.1 mN thrust and 2800 seconds specific impulse from approximately 50 watts total input power.