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Completed TRL 3 (started at 3, targeting 5)
Continuous human presence on the Moon will require materials made on-site. Many of these can be made from calcium and aluminum, elements available in the lunar soil, but their mineral grains (called anorthite) first must be separated from the other mineral grains in the soil. This project will combine two well-understood processes – electrostatic sieving and magnetic separation – to collect the anorthite grains. Specifically, we will build scaled-down devices for each of the two processes and test them separately, in atmosphere and vacuum, under cold and hot temperatures, on materials that simulate the makeup of various lunar soils. When we sufficiently understand the process constraints as they are likely to exist on the Moon, we will combine the devices into a complete system and test it in its entirety. We expect the final brassboard system to be able to process 3 kilograms per hour, outputting mineral grains between 20 and 200 microns across that exceed 70% anorthite by mass. The system will be less than 0.51 cubic meters in size and 35 kilograms in mass, and operate on less than 300 watts.
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