ISRU Collector of Ice in a Cold Lunar Environment (ICICLE)

Paragon proposes developing the a sub-scale hardware demonstrator of the in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) Collector of Ice in a Cold Lunar Environment (ICICLE), a Cold Trap for collecting and purifying water vapor from mining of water-ice from the permanently shadowed regions (PSR) of the lunar poles. Cold trap collection and purification of water from various lunar ice mining architectures is relatively undeveloped. This Cold Trap must be able to interface with the extraction methods as well as downstream processing systems, such as Paragonrsquo;s in-development ISRU-derived water purification and Hydrogen Oxygen Production (IHOP) subsystem. A well-designed Cold Trap will selectively freeze out and collect water vapor from other volatile contaminants while rejecting the corrosive, toxic, and explosive contaminant gases found with water in the lunar regolith. The thermal management system of the ICICLE Cold Trap will be designed to achieve both the desired water purity and collection rates through maintaining isothermal internal deposition surface temperatures while simultaneously rejecting heat from the phase change of water. To this end, this proposal will develop a sub-scale ICICLE Cold Trap for standalone testing in a thermal vacuum chamber with simulated water vapor and contaminant inputs to demonstrate the critical functions of the system. Furthermore, the ICICLE Cold Trap will be integrated with the Honeybee Roboticsrsquo; Polar Volatiles Extractor (PVEx) and tested in a thermal vacuum chamber to demonstrate end-to-end water extraction-to-collection capability.