To sustain affordable human and robotic space exploration, the ability to live off the land at the exploration site will be essential. NASA calls this ability in situ resource utilization (ISRU) and is focusing on finding ways to sustain missions first on the Moon and then on Mars. The ISRU project aims to develop capabilities to technology readiness level 6 for the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program and early human missions returning to the Moon. NASA is concentrating on three primary areas of ISRU: (1) excavating, handling, and moving lunar regolith, (2) extracting oxygen from lunar regolith, and (3) finding, characterizing, extracting, separating, and storing volatile lunar resources, especially in the permanently shadowed polar craters. To meet the challenges related to technology development for these three primary focus areas, the Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE) project was initiated in February 2005, through funding by the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. RESOLVE's objectives are to develop requirements and conceptual designs and to perform breadboard concept verification testing of each experiment module. The final goal is to deliver a flight prototype unit that has been tested in a relevant lunar polar environment. Here we report progress toward the third primary area creating ways to find, characterize, extract, separate, and store volatile lunar resources. The tasks include studying thermal, chemical, and electrical ways to collect such volatile resources as hydrogen, water, nitrogen, methane, and ammonia. We approached this effort through two subtasks: lunar water resource demonstration (LWRD) and regolith volatile characterization (RVC).


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    RESOLVE Projects: Lunar Water Resource Demonstration and Regolith Volatile Characterization



    Publication date :

    2008-03-03


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




    RESOLVE: Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction

    Quinn, Jacqueline / Baird, Scott / Colaprete, Anthony et al. | NTRS | 2011



    RESOLVE: Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction

    J. Quinn / S. Baird / A. Colaprete et al. | NTIS | 2011


    RESOLVE OVEN Field Demonstration Unit for Lunar Resource Extraction

    Paz, Aaron / Oryshychyn, Lara / Jensen, Scott et al. | AIAA | 2013


    RESOLVE OVEN Field Demonstration Unit for Lunar Resource Extraction

    Paz, A. / Oryshychyn, L. / Jensen, S. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2013