A Design Concept of Water Production Experiment Mission for Lunar Resource Utilization

Future missions for the Moon and the Mars exploration are advancing to a more active phase, and meanwhile in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) technologies will be much more important for their engineering purposes. Our research group in Japan has been conducting a feasibility study on experimental missions for lunar resource utilization since 1996. The objective of the research work is to conceptually design the unmanned ISRU experiment system for water production on the Moon, and to define the design requirements, essential technology breakthroughs, and a technical scenario for the mission development. This paper describes outline and recent status of our study.