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ESDMD #0603: Water Recovery from Lunar Regolith/Ice

Mining lunar water without losing it to the environment, and running the hardware in harsh, water-bearing places such as permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), at a target of about 700 kg of water a year (bin 6, rating 55 of 57). Today there are only "various methods and low TRL technologies tested with simulant at subscale". It is named in the Moon Base Users Guide (near-term), under the "ISRU systems" challenge (Tech gaps spreadsheet, ESDMD #0603; Users Guide, p. 13).

Quotations below are from row ESDMD #0603 of the tech gaps spreadsheet unless marked otherwise. ADD Rev C's Appendix D prints the same table for this gap, and it matches the row field for field (ADD Rev C, p. 230).

Description

"Water has been identified as a potential target to support sustained lunar presence through in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Techniques to mine or acquire the water so that the water is not volatilized (lost) to the environment in the process are a challenge. Another challenge is hardware operation in harsh water-bearing environments such as lunar permanently shadowed regions (PSRs)."

Impacts and benefits: "Without gap closure, water collection demonstrations may not be able to use scalable techniques needed for potential growth of resource utilization and frequent operations inside PSRs. With gap closure, in-situ sourced water would benefit future missions through reduction of delivered mass."

Current state of the art

"Various methods and low TRL technologies tested with simulant at subscale."

Performance target

Moon: "Enable the acquisition, processing, storage, and transfer of usable ISRU generated products at the Moon in a scalable manner. Produce on the order of 700kg water per year to meet Sustained Lunar Exploration habitation target state consumption rates, assuming 4 crew to the surface for 28 days."

The target says "Sustained Lunar Exploration". The Segments column, here and throughout the sheet, says "Sustained Lunar Evolution". The ADD's table has the same two wordings (p. 230). The same crew assumption gives 250 kg of oxygen a year in #0601.

Child gaps

  • 0603-01: Preprocessing of hard/icy regolith for ISRU
  • 0603-02: Sensors for monitoring of ISRU processes for water extraction
  • 0603-03: Regolith- and thermal-tolerant components for long-duration ISRU processes
  • 0603-04: ISRU system modeling for water extraction
  • 0603-05: In-situ resource extraction in Lunar PSRs

Traceability

  • Use cases and functions: UC-I-103 L -- All FN
  • Definition tasks: none listed

Segments and sub-architectures

Priority

Priority bin 6, overall prioritization rating 55 of 57. The rating is "the gap's location in the prioritized list of gaps", so 1 is the highest priority, and bins group gaps of similar priority, bin 1 highest. Criticality, urgency, breadth and depth set the order; cost is not considered (ADD Rev C, pp. 78, 199; method on the gaps index).

Moon Base relevance

The Users Guide names #0603 for one associated challenge (Users Guide, p. 13):

  • "ISRU systems": "Using local lunar resources to enable exploration requires both detailed knowledge of resource availability and systems to extract and process those resources." Also cited: tech gaps #0601, #0604 and #0605, and data gaps DN-006 L and DN-007 L.

The guide ties its challenges to "near-term Moon Base development efforts": missions in phase one "offer opportunities to collect data and mature technologies to enable essential phase two and phase three capabilities" (p. 11). See Technology and knowledge challenges, and Environment for what the sources say about volatiles and PSRs at the South Pole.

Same subject in the Ignition material (the pairing is the wiki's; the deck names no gap). The Moon Base Program's Ignition deck has ISRU as a Phase 3 key mission: "Phase 1 & 2 experiment & demo"; "Phase 3 continue demo and begin implementation"; "Key commodities from regolith: Oxygen, water, rare Earth elements, hydrogen" (slide 35), with "ISRU" labeled on the Phase 3 render (slide 31) (Ignition deck 2, slide 35). Water is one of its four commodities. The deck gives no production rate to set beside this gap's "on the order of 700kg water per year". For PSRs, its Phase 3 power and LTV lines have "Permanently Shadowed Region exploration" and rovers "Permanently shadowed region exploration capable using RHU & RTG" (slides 54 and 57), without tying them to water. The ISRU line by phase is on Phases.

Sources

Tech gaps spreadsheet, ESDMD #0603 · ADD Rev C, pp. 78, 199, 230 · Users Guide, p. 13 · Ignition deck 2, slides 31, 35, 54, 57