Mobile In-Situ Water Extractor (MISWE) for Mars, Moon, and Asteroids In Situ Resource Utilization

Abstract

In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) facilitates planetary exploration by drawing needed resources, such as water, from the local environment. This work presents a 3-step in-situ water recovery approach: 1) mining the soil using deep fluted auger, 2) extracting the water from soil within the flutes, and 3) discarding the soil before transporting the water to a main storage facility. Drilling in icy soil and ice has already been demonstrated in vacuum chambers by the authors. This paper focuses on the second critical step: water extraction from the icy soil or ice within the deep flutes. This paper reports on tests demonstrating efficient collection of water from ice-bearing soil under Mars conditions. The water recovery Mobile In Situ Water Extractor (MISWE) breadboard collected as much as 92% of the water initially present in the soil, and required as little as 0.9 Whr/g of energy (80% efficient compared to theoretical). The extraction process took approximately 40 min.

Accessing, Drilling and Operating at the Lunar South Pole: Status of European Plans and Activities

“…Selex-ES already has significant experience in the domain of planetary/non-terrestrial drilling applications Elements which shall be investigated during the LDD activity include the application of a roto-hammering function in order to increase the efficiency of the penetration of the drill. Experimental results show the large increase in material Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) with ice content (Zacny, 2012), peaking at around 90MPa at ~11.9 %/wt (approx. level of regolith saturation).…”

“…• Acquire samples from regolith at low temperature (~120K) and with potentially high ice content: experiments on Earth have shown that regolith at such cold temperatures and with ice content near saturation can have very high strength properties (Gertsch, 2006;Zacny 2012) and may therefore be very challenging to drill;…”

Commercial lunar propellant architecture: A collaborative study of lunar propellant production

“…These technologies have been ground tested by NASA under the Cryogenic Propellant Storage and Transfer Project and eCryo Project and were ready for Space flight tests in 2012 [48]. Quest has developed various MLI concepts and demonstrated the ability to limit heat flow to less than 0.5 W/m 2 with an area density between 1500 and 3000 g/m 2 (33) . Creare has developed and tested 90K and 20K cryocoolers using helium as the working fluid with Carnot performance around 0.1 [49].…”

Earth and Space 2014

“…Zacny et al (2012) recently proposed a very practical approach, which eliminates the Transportation stage (for moving regolith before processing, in the list above), but still requires Mining (e.g., removal of regolith from its original location, with a mobile mining rover) before processing to recover volatiles. Twenty years ago Wittenberg (1993) proposed taking advantage of the large increase in effective thermal conductivity of Lunar regolith when an interstitial gas, at near 1-atmosphere pressure, is present (e.g., resulting in a near 100fold increase in conductivity from the in-situ value of around 0.01W/m-K) to facilitate in-situ extraction of Helium gas (containing high concentrations of the isotope Helium-3) from lunar regolith.…”

“…The water (or other volatile) vapor is transported to a surface collection vessel where it is condensed (and collected). The method does not involve mining and extracting regolith before removing the frozen volatiles; thus it is likely to be significantly more efficient than approaches that require mining of regolith (e.g., Zacny et al, 2012;Richards, 2013). The approach does not involve construction of a gas-tight pressurized dome over the region of regolith to be processed, and so is less costly than alternative methods proposed for utilizing solar heat for in situ extraction of volatiles (e.g., Wittenberg, 1993;Frias et al, 2012).…”