NASA Students Challenge: Ideas To Harvest Water On Moon-Mars To Win $10,000

In another effort to let the genius brains around the world help NASA with its missions, the US Space Agency is now inviting applications from university-level engineering students for its quest to harvest water on the Moon and Mars.

NASA calls it the 2021 Moon to Mars Ice and Prospecting Challenge.

NASA

NASA explains the struggle faced by the astronauts on such expeditions in a recent post. It says that water is essential for many actions on such celestial missions, whether to drink, grow plants or make rocket propellant. It is, on the other hand, also ¡°heavy and expensive¡± to bring to such destinations from Earth.

The idea is then to meet these needs of water through water harvesting on the destination itself. The good news, NASA claims, is that ¡°water is more abundant in our solar system than previously thought.¡±

An example of this lurks in the shadows of the Moon¡¯s South Pole with a potential for hundreds of millions of tons of ice. But the question remains, how to harvest it?

The real challenge

NASA Artemis Mission (Image: NASA)

"The water we'll find when the next men and first women explore the lunar surface for the Artemis program is liable to be mixed with contaminants that need to be removed before drinking, or use as fuel," says Douglas Terrier, NASA chief technologist.

NASA thus wants ideas from eligible undergraduate and graduate student teams to overcome this issue. The main goal of the task would be to harvest as much water as possible from simulated portions of lunar and Martian surfaces.

NASA wants the participating students to design as well as build hardware that can ¡°identify, map, and drill through various subsurface layers.¡± The hardware should then be able to extract water from an ice block in a simulated test bed.

This artist's concept shows an astronaut on Mars, as viewed through the window of a spacecraft. (Representative Image: NASA/ JPL-Caltech)

In addition, each team will have to identify critical differences in the performed operations between Earth, Moon and Mars. The teams will then have to describe the essential modifications needed for each of the scenarios.

Process Flow

Those interested in the challenge must submit a project plan with detailed concept design and operations by November 24, 2020.

NASA will select up to 10 teams in December which will receive a ¡°$10,000 development stipend to build and test their systems¡± over a period of next six months. The teams will then have to demonstrate their capabilities in a three-day competition at NASA¡¯s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in June next year. Travel stipend might also be provided to top performing teams to present their idea at various NASA events.