Mining Water on the Moon may be as easy as heating up the regolith, and collecting the water as steam.

Mining The Moon For Water To Generate Rocket Fuel | The University Network

Imagine if the moon could generate all of the fuel for future space exploration. Well, that is part of the plan to mine the moon for water, a new mission for Dr. Philip (Phil) Metzger, planetary scientist with the Florida Space Institute (FSI) at the University of Central Florida, and Julie Brisset, research associate with FSI.

 From article, (Imagine if the moon could generate all of the fuel for future space exploration. Well, that is part of the plan to mine the moon for water, a new mission for Dr. Philip (Phil) Metzger, planetary scientist with the Florida Space Institute (FSI) at the University of Central Florida, and Julie Brisset, research associate with FSI.

Their new contract with United Launch Alliance (ULA) calls for them to develop a viable method for extracting water from the depths of the moon cheaply and efficiently.

Why mine the moon for water?

The ability to mine lunar bodies of water would advance ULA’s goal, as water could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to generate rocket fuel in space. The ability to refuel in space opens the door to more launch possibilities and lower transportation costs throughout lunar space and beyond.

The mined water could be used for other purposes as well, including life support systems, radiation shielding and drinking water for space explorers.

It could also help ULA fulfill its vision of a self-sustaining space economy in CisLunar, the space between the Earth and the moon.

“When you talk about getting things into space, weight matters,” Metzger said in a statement. “So we are looking at a technique that would require less stuff you have to transport which still gets the job done.”

The proposed technique is to extract the water in situ, which would obviate the need for heavy construction equipment and remove the extra step of hauling the soil. It would involve drilling holes into the depths of the moon, pumping heat through the holes to heat the regolith, and collecting the released water vapor through pipes in the holes.

Metzger came up with the idea of vaporizing the water in-place because of the common technique of using phase change of the ore — melting or vaporizing it — in mining and refining here on Earth, he said.

The technique could be used to mine water at different depths, but the optimum depth is a matter of cost-benefit analysis.

“We know from NASA’s LCROSS mission, where they impacted a spacecraft into a dark crater at the Moon’s south pole, that the lunar water is mixed in the soil from the surface down to a depth of 2 or 3 meters or even deeper,” said Metzger. “We can mine as shallow as we like, so it is a tradeoff of using more equipment and energy to mine deeper or moving your equipment more often to stay more shallow. Every time you start to mine a location, you heat the soil in that area. That represents an investment in energy that you don’t want to casually walk away from. So if you can keep getting water more deeply from that same location, then you have an incentive to keep doing so. Ultimately we will not know the answer to this question until after we do the research. We will study how efficient it is to mine at varying depths.

While heating the regolith is possible according to data they possess, they need “to figure out the right geometric configuration of the holes to increase the area that is heated,” Brisset said in a statement.

Otherwise, most of the heat would dissipate, and be wasted.

“If we do it right, we should be able to increase the area and the time it stays warm,” she added. “We will be doing a lot of modeling.”)

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