Imagine trying to survive on the Moon by mining ice from the soil to make drinking water and rocket fuel. This project built a machine that acts like a giant space-filter, pulling water out of lunar dust and cleaning it up. It's essentially a portable refinery for the Moon's surface.
Transporting water and fuel from Earth to the Moon is prohibitively expensive and limits mission duration. There is a critical need for reliable hardware that can extract and purify water directly from lunar ice.
An integrated laboratory test setup consisting of five main hardware components: LIBS hardware, quality monitoring tools, water extraction/liquefaction units, and purification/storage systems.
If you are a launch provider dealing with the high cost of transporting fuel from Earth — this project developed a water extraction and purification chain that allows for in-situ propellant production. This reduces the mass needed for launch by creating fuel on the Moon.
If you are a mining company dealing with resource recovery in frozen, low-gravity environments — this project developed a laboratory breadboard for water extraction from ice-simulants. This provides a blueprint for automated resource recovery in harsh conditions.
If you are a filtration company dealing with highly contaminated raw water sources — this project developed purification and quality monitoring hardware. This technology ensures water is safe for consumables even when extracted from raw lunar regolith.
Based on available project data, the specific cost of the hardware or the EU contribution amount is not provided.
No, the project focused on a laboratory breadboard and an integrated test setup to reach TRL 4, meaning it is a validated prototype in a lab environment, not an industrial scale plant.
Based on available project data, there is no specific mention of licensing terms or patent filings.
The technology is designed as a payload for a lunar lander, specifically targeting the European Large Logistics Lander.
The project ran from 2022-11-01 to 2024-12-31 to validate the process chain, serving as a preparatory activity for future missions.
The consortium is well-balanced for technology transfer, featuring a 50% industry ratio with 3 industrial partners (including Thales Alenia Space and SMEs like Scanway) and 3 academic/research entities. This mix of large-scale aerospace engineering and specialized SME agility across 4 countries suggests a strong pipeline from theoretical research to hardware prototyping.
Contact DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt eV) in Germany
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