A cross-disciplinary team from Mines is partnering with Pioneer Astronautics, an aerospace research and development company located in Lakewood, Colorado, to mature technology for sustainable exploration of the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program.
Pioneer Astronautics was one of four recipients of a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II-S award from NASA to mature technologies that will enable a sustainable human presence on the Moon. Together with Mines, Honeybee Robotics, and NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), Pioneer Astronautics will build and demonstrate hardware to produce oxygen and steel from lunar regolith (soil). Such technology would provide a foundation for manufacturing operations on the Moon using local resources, a process known as in situ resource utilization or ISRU.
The system Pioneer Astronautics will develop is called Moon to Mars Oxygen and Steel Technology (MMOST). MMOST employs physical particle size sorting, electromagnetic regolith beneficiation (or improvement of physical and chemical properties), materials handling, hydrogen reduction, electrolysis, and melt-refining to produce metallic iron and oxygen products with minimal power requirements.
Mines’ role in the project is to use the reduced lunar regolith simulant produced by Pioneer Astronautics to create a feedstock wire that can be deposited using additive manufacturing (AM) techniques and to measure quality and performance throughout the process. The team includes five professors across three innovative research centers at Mines: Angel Abbud-Madrid, Chris Dreyer, and Kevin Cannon from the Center for Space Resources (CSR), Craig Brice from the Alliance for the Development of Additive Processing Technologies (ADAPT), and Zhenzhen Yu from the Center for Welding, Joining, and Coatings Research (CWJCR).
“The vision,” said Craig Brice, director of ADAPT, “is to use local resources – lunar dirt – to make a feedstock that would then be used in a directed energy deposition AM process to make metallic structures on the moon.”
Vacuum chamber in the Center for Space Resources used to recreate lunar surface conditions at cryogenic temperatures.
Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of CSR, explained that to develop this technology, the process needs to be tested under the vacuum and temperature conditions of the lunar surface using the appropriate regolith simulant. “This is where CSR’s unique facilities come into play,” he said. “Our vacuum chambers, cryogenic equipment, and expertise in developing lunar soil simulants will be important to this program.”
The CWJCR will be instrumental in developing an optimized procedure to convert the regolith simulant into wire feedstock for AM deposition. “The CWJCR has unique laboratory facilities for the design and pilot-scale manufacturing of consumables for welding, joining, and AM,” said center director Zhenzhen Yu. Among the CWJCR’s notable equipment are a tubular drawing mill for experimental consumable wire manufacturing and an ultrasonic resonance particle mixer.
ADAPT has expertise in wire-fed metal AM and will oversee the deposition of the regolith feedstock wire into samples that will be evaluated for performance.
Following development and testing by the Pioneer/Mines team in Colorado, MMOST will be demonstrated as an integrated system in NASA JSC’s 15-foot vacuum chamber, bringing it to technology readiness level (TRL) 6. TRL 6 indicates that a system model or prototype has been demonstrated in a relevant environment and is ready to move on to demonstration in space. After testing, MMOST will remain at JSC for further testing as needed with other technologies.
The Mines team is proud to be part of this technology advancement. Abbud-Madrid said, “It is exciting to participate in a project that will get us one step closer to reducing our dependence on Earth materials in space by enabling us to manufacture parts from lunar resources.”