“It is extremely difficult to find a viable solution.”
Inventors are looking for a way to produce clean water on the Moon. The British Space Agency is funding £30,000 for 10 teams to compete to solve the challenging problem.
Inventors hope to figure out how to ensure a reliable supply The moon is clean water, and for this you may need a microwave from Tesco, writes The Guardian.
The idea of creating a lunar base with a crew was conceived many moons ago, but has not yet been realized, the publication notes. Since relying on water supplies from Earth is risky and expensive, one of the many challenges is extracting and purifying water from the ice that lies in the craters at the moon's south pole.
Such a supply would not only provide a resource for drinking and growing crops. crops, but would also make it possible to split water into hydrogen for use as rocket fuel and oxygen for the inhabitants to breathe.
Now the UK Space Agency has announced that it is providing £30,000 in seed funding with expert support to each of the 10 UK teams fighting to solve the problem.
Lolan Naicker of Naicker Scientific Ltd, one of the UK finalists Aqualunar Challenge, says that revealing the mystery to the general public allows people with very different problem-solving approaches and backgrounds to offer possible answers.
“It's actually extremely difficult to find a viable solution,” he said.
Nicker added that the first part of his team's plan is to heat up dirty lunar ice in a microwave oven. “I'm literally going to go today and buy a microwave from Tesco across the road, take it apart, take out the magnetron and then try and incorporate that into the first part of my process,” he said.
Naicker and his team are working on a “SonoChem system” that would use powerful sound waves to create millions of tiny bubbles in lunar water, creating high temperatures and pressures inside. The result, Naicker says, is the creation of highly reactive substances known as free radicals, which break down contaminants in the water.
But while the team has the basic idea, there is still much work to be done.
“Remember that first we need to go from dirty ice to liquid water. And we need to do it in a vacuum at -200°C,” he said.
Teams have just seven months to develop their ideas before a winner and two runners-up are selected in the spring of 2025. runners-up and the chosen trio will split a further £300,000 to continue working on their solutions. In addition, approximately £600,000 will be allocated to reward the decisions of Canadian-led teams.
Megan Christian, a UK Space Agency reserve astronaut and chair of the Aqualunar Challenge judges, said NASA's Artemis mission, supported by the European Space Agency and others, to return humans to the Moon was just getting started.
«So now is the perfect time for innovators to look at ways to purify water on the Moon — and frankly, we didn't actually know there was water on the Moon until relatively recently,» she said.
Megan Christian added that the Aqualunar Challenge, which is funded by the UK Space Agency's International Bilateral Fund and managed by Challenge Works in partnership with the Canadian Space Agency, has a very wide range of finalists, with teams also looking at how these technologies could be applied on Earth.
Naicker said his team has a number of plans. “We could make a slightly larger system, put it in the back of a van and take it to a war-torn area,” he said. “We could develop smaller units for developing countries where access to clean water is really difficult.”
Christian notes that the idea is that the new technology could be used on other space missions that involve water ice. “We know that, for example, there is water ice on Mars. So certainly these technologies could be adapted for use on Mars and other planetary bodies wherever we decide to go in the future,” she said.
The nine other UK finalists in the Aqualunar Challenge include also other inventors.
Nascent Semiconductor Ltd is developing a compact system called the Titania-Diamond Annular Reactor (TiDAR). This will allow the breakdown of contaminants in lunar soil using a titanium dioxide catalyst activated by ultraviolet radiation based on LEDs with diamond electrodes.
The British Interplanetary Society in London has developed the Ganymede Cup, a device in which a curved mirror focuses the sun's rays onto a sealed crucible containing lunar ice. The components, kept in ice, can then be boiled and stored one by one.
Queen Mary University of London, whose team is creating AquaLunarPure: a reactor that heats lunar ice until it becomes a solid material, and then heats it to over 373°C at 220 bar pressure, turning it into “supercritical water”, removing contaminants by oxidation.
Minima Design Ltd, Suffolk, has developed a cyclic volatile extractor (CVE), in which dirty ice is heated in a new closed chamber under variable pressure, allowing the removal and storage of various contaminants.
RedSpace Ltd has developed a regolith water neutralization kit with a Frank filter, in which lunar soil is heated to remove volatile gases before the remaining material is passed through a membrane to separate solids and liquids. The lunar soil is then distilled to produce water.
Perspective Space-Tech Ltd, which has created an innovative lunar water collection system called I-LUNASYS, in which lunar samples are heated to remove impurities in the form of gas. Reverse osmosis is then used to separate water molecules from the sample, followed by a UV filtration system as a final step.
Sean Fletcher and Dr Luqman Yusuf from the University of Glasgow plan to melt the dirty ice, remove large particles of soil and then pump the water using an ultrasonic system. This will remove gases, destroy contaminants and clump up any lunar dust before the water is filtered to remove any remaining contaminants.
Regolithix Ltd, which is developing Regolithic Ice Plasma Cleaner for Lunar Exploration (RIPPLE), in in which dirty lunar ice would be heated and water vapor and particulate matter would be separated using a device similar to a salad bowl. The steam can then be split using a plasma torch, and the hydrogen and oxygen separated using a molecular sieve.
Interstellar mapping experts have developed a static water extraction system (SWES) to sublimate various volatiles from lunar soil at lower temperatures. temperatures than when extracting and storing ice and water. The sample is then heated again to turn the water into steam, which is extracted and cooled.