ref. Nikolaus Täuber, Austrian press Agency, Science, Tech / APA / 09.01.2025, 06:01
The question of the availability of water is a decisive factor in whether a more or less permanently manned moon base can ever be realised. A research team from Austria has now produced its own ‘simulated’, pulverised moon rock – i.e. lunar regolith – in the laboratory and extracted over three litres of water from it in several experiments.
As part of the EU-funded ‘LUWEX’ project, experts from Germany, Poland, Austria and Italy worked together under the leadership of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Bremen and the Technical University (TU) of Braunschweig. The aim was to show how water can be extracted from lunar regolith dust, which contains or adheres to ice.
Thinking carefully about what goes into the moon suitcase
If you look towards a hypothetical lunar base that is repeatedly placed in space by space agencies such as the European ESA or the US NASA, you have to think very carefully about what you take with you from Earth for very expensive money and what you can extract on site in order to keep it in circulation for as long as possible, explains project partner Barbara Imhof from the Viennese space architecture platform LIQUIFER on the project website. Together with partners, the expert is thinking intensively about what can be found on the Earth’s satellite itself that could be used. In 2023, for example, a method was presented in the journal Scientific Reports for using concentrated sunlight to turn lunar regolith into cobblestones.
But moon rock or moon dust also contains water in the form of ice. It is not clear how much of this is in places where future bases could be established. However, there are estimates that ‘up to ten per cent of water could be found in the upper layers of the soil in the dark craters at the lunar south pole’, DLR project manager Paul Zabel told APA: ‘However, this still needs to be confirmed by on-site investigations.’
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