HYDRATION III: Water production on Mars
NASA is interested in returning humans to the Moon and eventually to Mars, this time to stay. A critical enabler for sustainable human exploration is water, and water in various forms, including ice, is believed to exist on both worlds. Accordingly, NASA and industry partners have sponsored the National Institute of Aerospace’s RASC-AL Moon to Mars Ice and Prospecting Challenge to elicit designs and proof-of-concept prototypes for ice mining and prospecting systems.
One water mining design well-suited to thick ice sheets, used in Antarctica today, is the Rodwell, where hot water is circulated under feedback control to sustain a self-deepening, simple and reliable water well. However, the Rodwell is not optimized for the presence of overburden or for energy efficiency. Our proof-of-concept Earth-conditions-analog prototype, HYDRATION III (High-Yield Dihydrogen-monoxide Retrieval And Terrain Identification On New worlds), is a dry-hole variant of the Rodwell, but based on down-hole radiative heating with immediate extraction of cold water instead of recirculation of hot water. Compared to the classic Rodwell design, the constant collection of cold water reduces heat losses into the ice and cools the boom assembly above the heater cartridge, helping to maintain the frozen neck of the ice cavity which supports the overburden and the hole wall.
For the "Terrain Identification" function, a number of sensors on the system collect independent data streams during drilling which are analyzed to produce a "digital core", i.e. to reverse-engineer the strength and thickness of different types of underlying units.
HYDRATION III was a finalist at the NASA RASC-AL Special Edition competition in September 2021 where we demonstrated the recovery of 24,335ml of meltwater in 12 hours of hands-off, fully remotely-controlled operations. The total water produced matched the total for all 30 teams since the competition began in 2017 while the gross water extraction rate of ~2 l/hr was demonstrated for a proof of concept system with a mass of 60kg and 1kWe power limit.
Video: Successful integrated test of hands-off (remotely operated) water production, Sept 1st, 2021.
The HYDRATION III architecture and proof-of-concept prototype won the First Place Overall, Most Water Collected and Best Technical Poster Awards at the 2021 NASA RASC-AL Special Edition competition in Hampton, Virginia. The RASC-AL website hosts a copy of the final technical paper and the technical poster.
My colleagues for HYDRATION III were Roland de Filippi (mechanical lead), Prakash Manandhar (electrical, electronics and software lead), Palak Patel (teleoperation pilot), Fabio Castro, Tao Sevigny, Sophie Yang, Eric Bui, Paula do Vale Pereira and Marcellin Feasson. This project would not have been possible without the contributions of every member of our team. My own role was team lead, lead designer and lead systems engineer and I also designed and built the rig structure which lasted (and evolved slightly) through many integrated tests and three competitions.
I'd also like to acknowledge our advisors Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman, Dr. Olivier de Weck, and Dr. Herbert Einstein, all our past colleagues on the HYDRATION and HYDRATION II teams with special shout-outs to Mohsen Alowayed, Andrew Adams and Amy Vanderhout, and all our collaborators from EPFL and the ASCLEPIOS analog mission who worked on related subsystems and tests.