Grant: Alliance Grants

The space industry is experiencing an exponential increase in the use of small satellites and landed vehicles to gain access to the Lunar and Martian resources. If material and energy can be harvested from these Space resources with in-situ processes and technologies, payloads and travel distances of spacecraft can be increased significantly. Lunar regolith or the Moon dust has drawn much attention, due to its content of plentiful inorganic elements and metal oxides. This project, leveraging the applied knowledge and experience in manufacturing reactive metallic composites, aims at development of a feasible and cost-effective method to extract metal fuel from lunar simulants. The proposed methodology addresses five research components: (1) selection and processing of lunar simulant powders for metal fuel production; (2) extraction and characterization of useful metal and alloy components from suitable lunar simulant powders; (3) characterizing combustion properties of metal fuel thin films; (4) fabrication of fuel pellets and quantifying their energy-release performance in a controlled environment; and (5) developing metal fuel production and utilization strategies to maximize energy harvest. The research outcomes, through technology development and training of the future workforce, are expected to enable in-situ utilization of lunar resources for thermal energy production and storage on the Moon. Essentially the successful project will help build infrastructures and increase humans' ability to inhabit and exploit the Moon. With technological know-how and validation of the reactor design, the industry partner will be enabled to commercialize the process and penetrate deeper into the target global space business market.