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Completed TRL 5 (started at 3, targeting 5)
The proposed research aims to develop an advanced thermal mining technology that integrates engineered extraction, transportation, and collection of water vapor at low pressure from lunar regolith. This will be realized through interlinked tasks of (a) measuring the thermophysical properties of icy regolith, (b) characterizing vapor sublimation rates of thermal drills, (c) transporting vapor in an electrostatic field, and (d) recapturing ice in an engineered cold trap with active ice deposition and delamination. Consequently, the vapor extraction, transportation, and re-collection sub-systems will be integrated into a lab-scale prototype to demonstrate 1 kg of ice collection capacity from icy regolith simulant. Finally, a system-level design and analysis will be performed for a scaled-up thermal mining architecture. The proposed effort aims to serve an important role in NASA's ISRU mission by providing fundamental research, lab-scale prototype design and demonstrations, and a system-level scale-up analysis for lunar water collection.
This project performed a preliminary analysis to explore the integration of the proposed effort with the Augur-based thermal mining technology currently being developed at NASA JSC Energy Conversion Systems (EP3) Branch. In alignment with Lunar ISRU architecture, a full scale Augur integrated system can support the production scale of 10 tons of O2 in 225 days. A pilot-scale can also be envisioned to take advantage of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services.
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