It may be getting cold in some parts of the country but the heat is on for the university teams that will be competing to develop technologies to mine for water on the Moon and Mars.
NASA and the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) have selected 10 university teams to participate in NASA’s 2019 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Special Edition: Moon to Mars Ice and Prospecting Challenge. The finalists will design, build and test prototype systems capable of extracting water from ice deposits buried beneath simulated lunar or Martian soil.
This technology innovation challenge seeks to advance critical capabilities needed on the surface of the Moon and Mars. The competition asks eligible undergraduate and graduate student teams to design and build hardware that can identify, map and drill through a variety of subsurface layers, then extract water from an ice block in a simulated off-world test bed.
“Competitions like this are really a win-win scenario,” said Jerry Sanders, system capabilities lead for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), or using space-based resources for human missions in deep space, at the agency’s Johnson Space Center. “NASA gets to look at options they hadn’t considered before. At the same time, the universities are giving their students practical experience that will help them get careers.”
Finalists were chosen through a competitive review of robust project plan proposals. The selected teams are invited to NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, June 4-6, 2019, to represent their universities. While at NASA, teams will participate in an on-site technology demonstration, and prospecting and water extraction competition. Judges include NASA engineers and researchers along with commercial partners from Honeybee Robotics and SpaceX.
The following teams are finalists for the 2019 Moon to Mars Ice & Prospecting Challenge: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with their Autonomous Prospecting and Extraction System; Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado, with their Fluid and Ice Recovery and Evaluation (FIRE) Drill; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with their High Yield Dihydrogen-monoxide Retrieval and Terrain Identification On New worlds (HYDRATION) project; Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, with their Northeastern University Prospecting Underground Distilling Liquid Extractor (NU-PUDLE); Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, with their Drill-based Extraction of Ice-water and Martian Overburden System (DEIMOS); University of Houston, with their Planetary Ice Extractor (PIE); University of Tennessee Knoxville with their This Is Now A Drill (TINAD) project; University of the District of Columbia with their Firebird Ice Rectifier and Extractor (FIRE); Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, with their Overburden Layer Ice to Vapor Extracting Robot; and West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia, with their Mountaineer Ice Drilling Automated System (MIDAS) III.
Armed with a $10,000 development stipend and lessons learned from previous competitors, teams now have six short months before coming to NASA to build, integrate and test their prototype water extraction systems. Final scoring will be based heavily on their ability to drill through each layer of the simulated subsurface to extract and collect the water found in the ice.
“Through this challenge, college students and faculty are provided a rare opportunity to be at the forefront of one of the most critical ISRU solutions needed for future human space exploration,” said Shelley Spears, NIA’s director of educational outreach and RASC-AL program director. “Even though the teams are competing against each other, they are also eager to collaborate and share ideas for prospecting and harvesting water on the Moon and Mars. This program is unique because teams work together and learn from each other to make improvements on their technologies, with the shared goal of one day enabling a sustained human presence outside our planet.”
Teams must adhere to specific requirements and must submit both a technical paper, capturing innovations and design, and a technical poster, detailing the team’s “path-to-flight” explanation for how their Earth-based system would be modified for operation in the lunar and Martian environments.
The 2019 RASC-AL Special Edition Moon to Mars Ice and Prospecting Challenge is sponsored by NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist, Science Mission Directorate, Space Technology Mission Directorate and the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at Langley, with support from the Human Exploration Operations Mission Directorate’s Advanced Explorations Systems and NASA Langley.
RASC-AL is managed by NIA. In addition to this special edition Moon to Mars Ice and Prospecting Challenge, NASA and NIA have partnered to administer the separate 2019 RASC-AL competition, which aims to get university teams to develop new innovative concepts to improve the ability to access and explore destinations via NASA’s Gateway in lunar orbit. This year’s RASC-AL themes range from using the Gateway as the hub of new science capabilities to using it as the jumping-off point for humanity’s return to the lunar surface.
Full competition details on the Moon to Mars Ice and Prospecting Challenge can be found by visiting the RASC-AL special edition website:
http://specialedition.rascal.nianet.org
Kristyn Damadeo
NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.
757-864-1090
kristyn.damadeo@nasa.gov