If we want to establish a sustained presence on the Moon and on Mars, we'll need water.
Water will help to enable agricultural efforts on the planet, produce propellant, reduce the need for oxygen, and provide abundant hydrogen for the development of plastics and other manufactured materials.
Before the water can be used to support sustained human presence on the Moon or Mars, however, it must be extracted from the ice deposits deep below the surface – a formidable task, given the heavy and dense layers that must be reached and broken through.
Getting to the ice will require a new kind of drill, or a system that can identify different layers and understand the necessary modifications required to mine through them.
A new NASA challenge called the Moon to Mars Ice and Prospecting Challenge asks university teams to explore and demonstrate new ways to identify different layers using system telemetry, and ultimately extract water from simulated lunar or Martian ice deposits.
"The best way to learn is to put learning into practice. For engineers, to design a solution to a problem. For scientists, to develop ways of extracting water from relatively hostile environments," Melvin Ferebee, director of the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA’s Langley Research Center, told Tech Briefs.
Over the course of six months, teams will build and test their systems at Langley, in preparation for a head-to-head competition in June of 2020.
In the Q&A below, Ferebee explains why these kinds of challenges are so important.
Tech Briefs: Why is this task particularly challenging? What do you imagine teams having the most difficult time with?
Melvin Ferebee: I believe it’s providing a unique, innovative solution that accomplishes the task of drilling, extracting water from ice, and cleaning the water to a point that it qualifies to be saved – and then doing it in the available time, with pretty difficult mass, volume, and power constraints on a sample soil of unknown composition.
Teams have the most difficult time dealing with layers of varying densities. It is extremely tough to design a system that can handle hard material like limestone and ice, but can still maneuver through clay, mud, and even fine sand without contaminating the water they are harvesting. Yet we need systems that can handle all of these types of soil composition, and this is the reason we are looking for unique solutions through this challenge.
Tech Briefs: Is this the kind of challenge that requires a brainstorm/out-of-the-box/wild idea approach that student teams may be able to provide?
Melvin Ferebee: The challenge is meant to elicit exactly that kind of thinking; however, the actual implementation of such thinking can’t violate the laws of Physics. There is definitely a balance between feasibility and innovation that teams have to address.
Tech Briefs: How will you work with the different teams? What happens after the teams are selected?
Melvin Ferebee: After teams are selected, we check in with them at regular intervals to answer questions, provide best practices, and to ensure they are making steady progress in their development. Immediately after teams submit Notices of Intent (NOIs) to compete in the challenge, we ask them to submit questions in writing and attend a Q&A webinar with the judges in mid-October. The questions are answered live on the Q&A webinar, where the judges also provide some additional context and lessons learned from previous challenges.
A major objective for this challenge is to learn from each other and continue to build on successful approaches that will help us move this technology forward. To help facilitate that, the judges host annual "lessons-learned" webinars and archive them on the challenge website for future viewing. We also host a knowledge-capture session with the competing teams at the end of each year’s challenge, to hear directly from the teams about what worked, what didn’t work, what could be improved on, and what different approaches they may use in the future. All of that information is compiled and placed into a lessons learned document on the challenge Resources webpage so that new teams can benefit from previous experience and don’t spend time re-inventing the wheel.
After teams are selected, they receive the first half of their development award to start building their systems. They can submit questions in writing to the judges at any point in time, and the answers are posted on the challenge FAQs page for all competing teams to see. In March, teams submit a mid-project report and a video documenting their progress and system capabilities. Teams must successfully pass their mid-project status review gate to receive the 2nd half of their stipend award.
Tech Briefs: Why are these kind of challenges, generally, so important? What can a student challenge produce that NASA might not be able to accomplish otherwise?
Melvin Ferebee: We do not have a monopoly of good ideas within the Agency. It is a good business decision to invest in the future generation of scientists and engineers to solve a problem we’ll face on other planetary bodies. These activities prompt collegiate students to investigate, plan, and analyze space exploration design at differing states of development, fuel innovation and out-of-the box thinking. The students benefit from hands-on experience working on a real NASA problem, and NASA benefits from diverse teams who bring fresh perspectives to the problem. It’s an inexpensive way for NASA see multiple potential solutions – learning from what works and what doesn’t work during the student’s technology demonstrations. This helps us narrow down our focus on which solutions we want to invest more time and resources exploring.
What do you think? Share your comments and questions below.
Transcript
00:00:03 hey everybody I am Scott Bednar and we are very excited to bring you live coverage from NASA's moon from Mars ice and prospecting challenge we are coming to you live from NASA Langley Research Center inside their historic aircraft hangar and Martian exploration challenge and that is how to extract ice subsurface ice and melt that ice into water this is not something that's
00:00:36 simple to do but these teams seem to be up to the task so why don't we get a closer look at what's going on behind us let's do it so we've recently discovered what else thought to be large ice deposits under both the lunar and Martian surfaces so these ice deposits can play a very significant role in establishing a sustained human presence beyond our
00:00:57 planet I mean imagine if you went to the moon and you can actually harvest the water and use it for drinking or for propulsion or for other resources the farther that humans venture into space the more important it becomes to many absolutely right that's actually called n6e resource utilization we're gonna get to that a little bit later in the show NASA is preparing to send the first
00:01:21 women and the next man to the moon in 2024 with new technology food systems were able to explore more locations across the surface than we ever thought was possible and this time when we go we're going to establish a sustainable human presence on and around food but they're going to see today at the moon to Mars icing prospect and challenge represents an important step I hope you
00:01:45 stay with us today as we chew or how each of these teams has approached the challenge of harvesting water IDEs from beneath a simulated flights of extraterrestrial world one of these ice drilling systems and get her better close-up view actually works yeah let's take a look at one of these big blue bins you are going to see a lot of these today and that's because every
00:02:13 team has one what's inside well there are layers and layers and layers of unknown materials it's unknown to teams ultimately what they need to do is figure out a way to get through all of those layers and reach a giant ice block beneath once they get to that ice block then they need to figure out how to extract it how to harvest it and bring it up to the surface of liquid water if
00:02:33 everything goes to plan that liquid water will begin to pool inside one of these beautiful buckets later on judges are going to assign point values to the team based on things like how much water they weren't able to collect and how clear the water is is it something you would want to yeah well then you get more points but before they even reach that ice
00:02:51 they have another challenge ahead of them these teams actually have to dig through several layers of which meant to be simulated the simulated surface of the Mars and moon they don't know what the layers are made of they don't know how many layers there are how thick they are so that's something that they have to determine using drilling telemetry so they're actually collecting data on the
00:03:10 drill that you see here and they're putting that together into a digital core that's basically a demonstration of their knowledge and understanding those layers and they're gonna be judged on that as well they're gonna be at they're gonna be going now before we go to Warren's at the teams in their technology their background was better and he's going to
00:03:26 talk a little bit tonight and prospected introduce although you asked I read like this NASA's Chief Technologist thank you so much for joining us hey it's great to be here I'm really excited about being a part of this so I've got to ask first what does the Chief Technologist do yeah great question so um the Chief Technologist role is to really advise the administrator and the leadership
00:03:45 team on technology policy and help to shape and guide our technology investment strategy across the four mission directorates across the agency fantastic so I also understand that NASA is embarking on some very exciting plans to return to the moon please tell me more about that yeah so we've got project Artemis which is our effort to return to Earth and to line the first
00:04:05 woman on the moon by 2024 it's like one of the most exciting times in NASA's history we've got a series of activities around going now already with the SLS Orion the Gateway and we're planning to build Landers using a lot of commercial partners and international partners eventually to do what's going to be an exciting not just return to the moon but to develop the moon's resources and for
00:04:26 long-duration sustainable activity on the moon that's right so what our challenge is like the MA Munchen Lara's ice prospecting challenge add to that how do they add to our yes so the difference between what we really need for long missions in space whether it's the Moon or Mars eventually is really to be able to use the resources that are there right it's just too
00:04:47 incredibly expensive but for its mana cost and a standpoint to bring everything with us we can kind of do that for our sortie a short duration stay like they did on Apollo but if you gonna be there for an extended period really live and work like we do on an International Space Station we absolutely need to learn how to use all the resources there to ins't you on the
00:05:05 surface they're there at the moon and in the environment and this challenge is exactly targeting one of the key resources that we're trying to exploit on the moon which would be water which would be water in this case so what do we know about water yeah so you know what's really interesting is if we were having this conversation even 5-10 years ago that would be there'd be a lot of
00:05:27 speculation but recently with our robotic efforts we can now confirm that there's billions of gallons of water on the South Pole North Pole of the moon there's water on Mars and it's in the regular Todd Mars and we're learning now with efforts like this how we can extract and utilize that resource could actually have a direct impact on our future exploration of the moon
00:05:52 absolutely and have to say as I've walked around and looked at some of these the the setup is pretty realistic pretty representative of what we'd expect in terms of you know the conditions and the regolith and so on and I'm just impressed by the variety of approaches that are being taken it's very exciting for students to have this opportunity as well what what is NASA
00:06:10 get out of engaging students in university at this age yeah so great question I mean I think we have to we all recognize that myself and my generation were many of us were inspired to stem and science and math and technology careers from what we saw and what we're doing now with Artemis and our Moon and going on to Mars is inspiring another generation but that's
00:06:33 a two-way street because we're providing inspiration to students but at the same time we're getting like really diverse new ideas different approaches from our university partners from student teams that we wouldn't get otherwise different way of thinking it is a different way of thinking I think that's kind of the hallmark of innovation right is kind of a diverse different point of
00:06:51 view with a different set of experiences that's fantastic well Douglas I want to say thank you very much I hope you enjoy the rest of the moon tomorrow's ice and prospecting challenge awesome thanks for having me all right Jesse I'm gonna throw it back to you one day systems like these could be used to extract water below the surface of
00:07:23 the Moon or Mars and for future explorers accessing water will be crucial for creating a sustained human presence beyond Earth let's go talk to one of the teams we're going to talk to Virginia Tech first Maria thank you so much for being with us thank you tell me a little bit about your design so our design is the overburden layer ice to pay for
00:07:42 extraction robot originally intended to heat up the ice and then we would extract vapor now for on earth operation we do have to you don't have to extract water instead of paper just because of the atmosphere on earth that would be absent on the Moon or Mars and do you know how your system compares with some of the other teams here so I think what really separates Oliver from the rest is
00:08:03 that it's part of a bigger picture so are allowed the fielding space experimental robotics laboratory does a lot of work with in space assembly and in situ resource utilization so for us Oliver is just another tool in making sure that humans become a multi planet civilization that's really awesome and how is everything going for you today it's going pretty well we're about
00:08:25 actually about to start up again on a hands-on operation and what does that mean hands-on operation it means that we'll be in full control of the robot and later on we may choose to go autonomous meaning that all of it will be behaving by itself do you expect that you'll be able to go at an abyss I think we will be able to yes and are you expecting to be able to collect some
00:08:42 water I think we will I'm fairly confident yes awesome thank you so much for talking with me and good luck to you I'm gonna throw it back over to Scott and he's going to talk to another one of the teams thanks Jesse all right I want to introduce everybody to team West Virginia and my friend over here named Kermit Kermit good see again so you have got a very interesting solution
00:09:00 to get down into this and drill tell me a bit about it so our theme this year was to keep things as simple as possible so we're used one bit to kind of trite the overburn and extract water you can see here this is our all-in-one Pro up the a IOP which grows down into the overburden and MLC ice this was made designed by us with the heart of overburden players in mind
00:09:25 and it was manufactured and fabricated by a proto labs a professional prototyping company based in Minneapolis so it includes a PDC bit that can go through any hard layer a copper heater housing that houses all the heaters to have melty ice and aluminum body and a slip ring slippering in a water swivel that allowed the world's rotate and rig itself is made out of carbon fibre to
00:09:51 decrease way and I use electro coagulation to help clear out the breeze from ending up from the water will extract okay you've really cut this up so how is it working so far have you have you gotten through the different layers so we've gone through the different layers and right now we had a problem with our first AIO pia got clawed we unplugged it and right now
00:10:14 we're trying again to extract the water we should have water in a couple of minutes now we're hoping so we're gonna do that and move to another area to drill and hopefully soon okay well I wish you the best of luck and good luck finding that water I hope you hit a spring so thank you very much alright let's go check back in with dressing who's out on the competition floor and
00:10:34 see what she's up to Jesse back to you as we walk around the pit today you're gonna see that all of these drilling systems have a unique design each team brings a different idea to the table and that diversity of ideas that we get from including students in a competition like this really helps our collective understanding now today is day one of the competition and teams are operating
00:10:55 their systems for the very first time that's right and it's actually very exciting how unique these different systems are most of the University students today are using a drill to dig through the simulated lunar and Martian soil to get to that ice below it along the way to that ice these teams must collect data about the layers that they're drilling through how many layers
00:11:13 are there how thick are they how dense are they and then they will use this information to create a digital core that they will be judged on later in the competition okay I think Jesse is actually with one of the competition organizers so let's go check back in with her and learn a little bit more about how this competition came to be Jesse back to you thanks Scott I'm here
00:11:33 it's jelly spheres who actually is in charge of putting this whole event together so Shelly thank you for being with us and can you tell me a little bit about how the competition is going competition is going beautifully especially considering that we added a level of rigor and difficulty to this year's competition we're thrilled with the progress the teams are making and I
00:11:51 know they're thrilled as well they do so we added a prospecting element so what we mean by that is that the teams as they go through the overburden on their way to the ice and there the goal is to harvest ice but there are multiple layers that have been placed inside this overburden that we very carefully packed earlier this week and so we're asking the teams to use drilling telemetry to
00:12:18 provide a little bit of ground truth about what the characteristics are of the overburden as they make their way to the ice well we really need them to provide like I said this ground truth of understanding exactly what those layers are like as opposed to guessing so I think that that kind of data will help inform how we perhaps and engineer our instruments and how we can use that data
00:12:45 to better understand really what's going on below the surface I think they're doing pretty well we've had a couple of teams have already gone through the process of creating a digital core some of them are going to wait until tomorrow to go through that process and they're going to be looking at things like their penetration rate the power and then also some of the
00:13:08 speed some of the information so this is fairly simple data that they're going to be collecting but it's very useful data and I think that it's going to help really inform some of what NASA is doing when they're looking at drilling on moon and on the Moon and Mars I think these challenges provide a relatively low-cost opportunity for NASA to be able to explore the trade spaces
00:13:31 and concepts and designs for this really important is our you challenge of harvesting water it's really the one of the most important challenges that we face in space exploration so they're able to actually see what these prototypes look like and how they operate and then sometimes just seeing is believing I mean there's nothing you can write a paper about it but to
00:13:49 actually see it working there's no substitute really cool to see all the designs here today I know there's also a component sure we've been so lucky to have our industry support with honeybee robotics they've been terrific providing judges we have SpaceX we have dr. Keith nice Warner who's with us from who heads up Mars surface robotics for SpaceX these
00:14:12 companies have been really helpful in helping inform the requirements and constraints in the design of the competition and we also have sponsors that are helping us with turbidity testing which is looking at the clarity in the water the quality of water that they're harvesting as well as companies like aircon and Buechel stone that have provided some of the materials that are
00:14:31 in the overburden that leads to this prospecting element that we added this year so we're looking thank them so much for all their support and one last thing is with the prototype proto labs they provided $20,000 in service grants for some of our teams to apply for grants for them to be able to do rapid 3d manufacturing so really appreciate all of their help
00:14:53 yes yes yes well for this particular competition we're already working on the design for the competition for next year and we expect to release it probably in July or August and it'll go out to the University community and they're welcome to check back on the website which I know you have published on the feed and check back in July or August Thank You Jess Thank You Jessi now for those of us
00:15:29 who are just tuning in you are watching NASA's moon tomorrow's ice and prospecting challenge live where University teams behind me are attempting to drill through lunar and Martian soil simulated lunar and Martian soil we don't have the real stuff here to get to the ice that's hitting below it okay this is very exciting and this is not an easy task to do how do I know
00:15:49 this isn't easy well I'm not doing it that's why but these teams do seem to have some in very interested solutions on how to solve this challenge one-day systems like these could actually be used to extract water below the surface of the Moon or Mars and for future explorers accessing water will be crucial for creating a sustained human presence
00:16:09 beyond Earth alright everybody I want to go over to the University of Houston and introduce everyone to my friend Charlene hi Charlene can I just interrupt how are you doing so how is everything going with your your technology demonstration today we're doing fantastic things are working out pretty well we had a little bit of issues at the beginning of with our way down the bit but now that things
00:16:31 are working out just smooth sailing so yeah okay so I see it running over there what's going on how far down are you do you know Andrew how far down are you 295 millimeters down is that is that good how much further do you have to go or do you not know another 220 millimeters to go okay so about halfway so tell me what you intend to do once you reach the ice below it how do you
00:16:54 intend to extract it sure so we're gonna use a resist you know idea to go melt the ice then after it melts because gonna melt radially after does that we're going to pump it out using a peristaltic pump and then it'll go through a filtration system and have clean water and is everything looking good so far yes everything is looking pretty good so
00:17:13 far we're actually really excited yeah fantastic well I wish you the best of luck get back to it I hope for a spring of water to appear for you I hope for a spring of water to appear okay thanks take care alright I'm gonna throw it back to Jesse who is with another team and let's hear about another demonstration thanks Scott I'm here with Dana from the Stevens Institute of
00:17:33 Technology thank you so much for being with us David no problem so tell me a little bit about your design so our design is back here demos and how it works is we have this rectangular frame is the drill mountain on linear slides next to the extractor so basically what happens is our drill slides over goes down into the hole and the drill mount that we have up there has a beam load
00:17:56 cell on the top and that measures our weight on bit and also creates our digital core by measuring the hardness that the impact the drill bit has and then once it drills down we have limit switches on the top and bottom that'll tell us when the drill has reached its final position and when it's up at the top the drill bit will come out and then it'll move over and
00:18:14 the extractor will fall in and be lowered in and then the extractor there is a cartridge heater in the middle of it and then a bunch of tubes surrounding that and little holes on the sides so the way that we extract water is using a recirculation technique so our pump will pull water all the way up through the extractor and then once the extractor housing is filled it'll push the water
00:18:34 back into the hole essentially melting more ice and then we're able to pull all the water out at some point and push it through our filter which is a gravity fed filter made up of polishing pads and also a little bit of sand in between to help filter all that out and then it'll go down to the collection bucket it sounds like you've put a lot of thought into this have you had any success so
00:18:54 far yeah we actually have where I just drilled our second hole there and where right now we're in the hands-off mode this morning we drilled our first hole we started off hands-off but we ran into an issue with our drill bit moving back a little too much so we had to go hands-on and fix our extractors who fit in the hole and we actually collected probably a little under a liter of water
00:19:13 so far while being hands-on which is really exciting it's pretty clear it's not mucky at all so our filter is working really well and we're feeling pretty good right now that is awesome have you been able to collect any information for the digital core yet we have but we haven't really looked at it I think we're gonna focus on that a lot more tomorrow so we have
00:19:29 more time as you're working some of the kinks out of our system but definitely tell because just start drill as a hammer drill bit so it's really loud but starts to hammer we can tell when it's reaching all the different layers that is awesome I really wish you the best of luck thank you so much for talking with us and good luck to you thank you I'm gonna throw it back over
00:19:46 to Scott and he's got one more team that we're gonna talk to you today what do you got Thank You Jesse okay I want to introduce everyone to team MIT and my friend Andrew how're you doing Andrew don't okay how are you I'm doing great so tell me about your design behind us here sure so our design like many teams here has two separate systems we have one for drilling and one for heating our
00:20:04 system is unique because we're trying to do radiative heating so we actually don't let the heater touch the water directly we get we heat it up to about 500 degrees Celsius and it actually irradiance the ice around it so it's so since infrared radiation can penetrate water only to a certain depth we heat like the outer shell of the hole at and it grows on the inside and we pick it up
00:20:25 from the bottom so have you been able to reach the water yet we have so we were able to reach water in less than an hour when in hands-on operations we just tried to do a hands off hole which proved a little bit more difficult so we're gonna try and do another one here in the world bed so can you just explain for everyone at home the difference between hands on and hands off at this
00:20:43 competition sure so four hands on you are allowed to physically touch the robot you can like feel certain motor drivers and you because this motor getting too hot yes okay stop it four hands off you can't do that they're supposed to have limited visibility and you can and you can't touch it okay so how much water have you collected so far actually if we look at these buckets
00:21:03 over here you can actually see you've gotten a bunch it's a big bucket it's hard to tell exactly how much so hands-on we've got probably somewhere between a liter in a liter and a half and hands off a few milliliters how much more you expecting to have any idea it would be nice to double or triple it before the end of the competition we have about two-thirds of
00:21:23 the amount of time left so I don't see why not especially if we're only getting better all right well hey I wish you the best of luck Andrew thank you very much Cheers all right let's go find Jessie back out on the competition floor and see what is going on Jessie back to you thanks Scott that was really cool to see all of those teams it's so cool to see all the different designs coming
00:21:42 together some of them are harvesting ice and melting it in separate chambers some of them are L melting the ice directly beneath the soil and others are actually letting the ice condense into a gas and then converting it back into water somewhere else in their system there are so many different ways to solve this challenge it's really fascinating to see all the different ideas these students
00:22:00 have come up with here okay now NASA is not the only one to recognize the importance of technology demonstrations like the ones we're seeing here today industry sponsors do as well so why don't we go in here from one of those sponsors about why they chose to get involved in the moon tomorrow's ice and prospecting challenge Jessie I'm going to throw it back to you thanks Scott I'm
00:22:19 here with Rachel from ping I hope yeah thank you so much for being with us of course thank you for having us so tell me about your involvement in the challenge okay so pink Opie has been involved in the Mars ice challenge for several years we sponsored their turbidity testing so while most teams focus on their drills and getting water out what we do is actually dealing with
00:22:38 the water once it's out so what we do is the water that's drilled out of the out of the ice goes through testing to find out about quality measures usually it's just clarity at this point but once we get more water we can really see you know how usable is this water you know how easy is it to treat you know what needs to be done to it in order to get it to a place where it can be useful to
00:23:04 astronauts and why does pant copia why did they choose to get involved we chose to get involved mainly because we've been working with NASA since our inception as a company about five years ago and the work we do for NASA is really about water quality in space we've been working on a biological nitrogen removal system for the space station that helps them recycle water in
00:23:26 space once it's up there don't think too hard about it but water usability in space is really important because water is so heavy and it's so hard to get places which is why the Mars ice challenge is exist you know using resources that are available and already there to their maximum potential so water quality is really important to us as a company especially in space so
00:23:50 being able to sponsor this part of the Mars ice challenge is really perfect for us as a company that's awesome I mean it's such an important part of the challenge making sure that the water is clear yeah we love doing it yes I've walked around and looked at quite a few of the designs there they're really intriguing and especially being able to see both the drills and the water that
00:24:12 comes out of it throughout the years has been really fascinating seeing how far everything's come along it's pretty cool though they've already we've already seen a couple teams that collected waters I know it's really exciting for us of course Thanks I'm going to throw it back over to Scotty to see how things are going at found in the pit over to you Scott Thank
00:24:35 You Jesse and for those of us Michael story now we are coming to you live from NASA's moon to Mars ice and prospecting challenge where University of teams have gathered to attempt to solve a dilemma how do you get through simulated Martian or lunar soil and find ice hidden beneath it and then how do you extract that ice it is not something that's easy but these these teams do seem to be up
00:24:57 to the task okay I want to introduce everybody to someone else another NASA friend of mine who knows a thing or two about this challenge Chris it's good to see you again how are you good to see you Scott how you been I'm great so I understand you know a little bit about this challenge mainly because you helped put it together so you're the best person to
00:25:12 ask what is the point of the moon to Mars ice and prospecting challenge well it's really all in the name there we're learning how to do the things we need to do both for our upcoming missions to the moon and to Mars we want to figure out how are we going to understand the sub surfaces that we encounter on the way to exploring both planets or the planet and the moon there as well as understand how
00:25:33 we're actually going to get at water to eventually enable us to do missions at Mars so we already know that there's there is water on moon and on Mars yes we found evidence that there's some amounts of water on the moon especially in some of the permanently shadowed regions of the craters there and there's a lot of evidence for water on Mars pretty much
00:25:50 all over the surface so it's really a matter now figuring out exactly how much there is where to get it and how to get it it's very exciting okay so the students here today are attempting to solve a very difficult challenge can you tell me a little bit more about what they're doing and how differently each of them are approaching this sure thing so the way we're challenging them here
00:26:07 is we prepared these competition bins that you've probably already seen walking around that are filled with several different layers of materials that the student teams don't know about we know what they are but for them we've only given them the most basic guidelines to prepare for they've had to design their systems to drill through those and then get to ice that's at the
00:26:25 bottom of the bins extract that in some form and convert it into clean water some of them are taking the approach of drilling in there others are trying to hammer their way in in order to get to it and then once they actually get their water and start pulling it out they're experimenting with different ideas for how to filter it and get it clean enough that we would be able to actually use it
00:26:42 so why do they want a filter do they get different points if they do so yes so we give them points for producing cleaner water because cleaner water is what we're going to need not just for the astronauts to be able to use but also in order to make rocket fuel and propellant in order to come home if we've got a lot of dirt or other materials mixed in with it it's a lot harder to work with so
00:27:01 we're challenging them to come up with solutions to filter that water and have it as clean as possible what other what other ways can teams accrue points here at the challenge there's a number of ways so in addition to the designs that you're seeing here today these are all derived from designs they have made for the purposes of actually being able to fly at Mars so in their papers that they
00:27:19 have written with this they describe how these concepts work on Mars and how they've adapted them then to the test environment we're showing today they've also put together posters to illustrate what they're doing and they're producing what we call a digital core this is where they have to use telemetry coming off of their systems in order to understand what those different layers
00:27:37 are they're passing through how thick they are and how tough they are and how can those technologies one day help NASA oh they're going to enable us to do a lot of the goals we have for exploration so right now we've only ever landed a very few things both on the moon and on Mars and most of the knowledge we have about the surface only comes from the very top layers but
00:27:55 we're expecting that to get to some of the things we want to do we're gonna need to know how to get down deeper and to know how do we're gonna do that we need to be able to measure what's going on so part of this is enabling us to better get the ground truth we need going down the other part the water part is understanding how we're going to extract water to be able to use it
00:28:12 someday so we've got nine different University teams with anywhere from five to six or seven people on a team what are these students getting out of this win or lose I think it's a ton I think they're getting an opportunity to take on a real meaningful challenge that isn't just for their own educational benefit but it's actually helping NASA so in that way they are helping carry us
00:28:31 forward on this mission to the moon and then on to Mars in addition they're getting the opportunity to interact with NASA engineers and folks in industry in order to kind of understand what they need and be able to take that back and inform them all on top of getting to build and test some pretty cool hardware yeah I'd say well Chris thank you very much for joining us today and Jesse I'm
00:28:51 going to throw it back to you out there in the field an important step in establishing a sustainable human just imagine with the resources of tomorrow are going to be when we make this next giant we have seen a lot of exciting prototypes today Jesse they even got water they got water we have water
00:29:18 already so these teams behind us these University teams have truly come up with some unique and out-of-the-box designs to solve this challenge and these designs could one day help further NASA's human exploration goals back to the moon you want to learn more about NASA's return to the early in 2024 visit nasa.gov or the nasa's moon tamara's ice
00:29:38 and prospecting challenge i am scott Bednar and I'm Jesse well thank you so much for being with us and remember this is your space agency get to know it [Music]
