Thermal Management System for Lunar Ice Miners

The millions of tons of ice water discovered by the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission is considered to be the most valuable resource on the moon. Extracting this water ice from Lunar regolith would require a very high thermal energy input and inversely, capturing this water vapor in the near-vacuum environment also requires significant cooling capacity. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a robust thermal management system (TMS) for future Lunar Ice Mining Rovers that are powered by radioisotopes. Advanced Cooling Technologies, Inc. (ACT), in collaboration with Honeybee Robotics (HBR), proposes to develop a thermal management system that can strategically use the waste heat of nuclear power sources to sublimate water vapor from icy-soil on the moon and use the Lunar environment temperature as the heat sink to refreeze the sublimated vapor within the cold trap container. This minimizes the required electric energy for both ice extraction and vapor collection, with a lower system mass and footprint. In Phase I, ACT/HBR team will perform a detailed trade study and design multiple thermal components of TMS including a waste heat-based thermal coring drill and a heat pipe radiator cold trap tank. A proof-of-concept prototype will be developed and tested in Phase I. A preliminary full-system that can potentially meet NASArsquo;s mining requirement will be designed and evaluated for the mining efficiency, system mass/volume and power consumption (both electrical and thermal).