This innovative microwave can help convert ice into clean drinking water

Nassa Artemis mission It aims to build the foundations of human existence in the long term on the moon by the end of the contract. To achieve this goal, space agencies have to return to the basics of survival: foodWater and shelter. With this spirit, a team of researchers from a British technical company won 150,000 pounds (194,070 dollars) to develop an innovative system to provide clean drinking water on the moon.

Their Sonocham System won the first place in The International Aqualunar Challenge, a competition funded by the UK Space Agency and was organized with the Canadian Space Agency and others. The challenge seeks to push the technological innovation of future lunar housing, specifically with regard to access to clean drinking water on the moon. The UK Space Agency announced the winners of A. statement Publishing Thursday.

“Spacers will need reliable water supplies to drink and develop foods, as well as oxygen for air and hydrogen for fuel,” Megan Christian, Chair of the Aqualunar Challenge Jury, said in the statement. “It is estimated that 5.6 % of the soil (known as” Reagole “) is around the southern pole of the moon as freezing water as a agle. If it can be successfully extracted, separated from the soil and its purification, it makes a viable overlooking rule.” Christian is also the pioneer of the reserve space and the leadership of commercial exploration at the UK space agency.

Under Lolan Naicker, coach of Naicker Scientific, the first place team developed a kind of lunar microwave that purifies water extracted from lunar ice. Simply put, the Sonochem system uses sound waves to form bubbles in the lunar water, as it creates high temperature and pressure that is unstable and chemically interactive atoms called free radicals that remove water pollution.

“Imagine the dug in your posterior garden in the middle of the winter and try to extract the frozen water for drinking. Imagine now doing this in an environment -200 ° C, which is an ideal vacuum, under low gravity, and a very few electric card,” explained Naicker. “This is what we will have to overcome on the moon.” He added that if their Sonocham system can work successfully on the moon, it can also be used in Mars or remote areas on Earth with difficulty accessing clean drinking water.

First place in the first place includes a team for the father and agents that provide the method of filtering three continuous drinking water, and a team from Queen Mary University in London accommodates the strength of the reactor. The challenge gave second place 100,000 pounds (129,380 dollars) and 50,000 pounds (64,690 dollars), respectively.

“Many of these ideas were not only able to fuel the exploration of space in the future, but also help in improving life and resolving water shortage here on Earth – in providing traces of climate change while we are working on a net zero future.”

Little by little, techniques like Sonochem system turned science fiction into reality. Clavius ​​base from 2001: Odysse Spaceanyone?