An ambitious project to find and purify water for growing crops on the Moon is underway, and could involve a microwave from Tesco.
The joint UK-Canada £1.2 million Aqualunar Challenge is launching to support development of water-purifying technologies for the Moon, for use in growing food and even powering the rocket’s return journeys.
The UK Space Agency has announced that it is awarding £30,000 in seed funding, with expert support, to ten teams trying to crack the issue of water on the moon.
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The government says that the Aqualunar Challenge will award UK-led start-ups with seed funding to develop technologies to purify ice buried beneath the Moon’s surface to “make human habitation on the Moon viable.”
(Image: UK Space Agency)
And Lolan Naicker of Naicker Scientific Ltd, one of the UK finalists of the challenge, has a very interesting ploy to try and make that happen.
“It’s extremely difficult to actually come up with a viable solution,” he said.
He added that the first part of his team’s plan is to microwave the dirty lunar ice. “I’m literally going to go out today, buy a microwave oven from Tesco across the road, and strip it down, take out the magnetron and then try to incorporate that into the first part of my process,” he said.
(Image: Getty Images)
Naicker hopes to use powerful sound waves to generate millions of tiny bubbles in lunar water that will cleanse it.
The teams only have seven months to develop their ideas before a winner is chosen. Between the winner and two runner up teams £300,000 in further funding will be shared.
Meganne Christian, a UK Space Agency reserve astronaut and chair of the Aqualunar Challenge judging panel, said the scope could even widen to Mars.
“We know that there’s water ice on Mars, for example. So absolutely, these technologies could be adapted for use on Mars and other planetary bodies, wherever we decide to go in the future,” she said.
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