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Astronautics
Exploration Projects
PROSPECT
in-situ thermal processing and extraction of volatiles from
lunar regolith with feasibility studies and thermal design.
The involvement of LRT also includes the development of
a breadboard for sample conditioning and experimental
demonstration of the volatiles extraction process. With
respect to future in-situ resource utilization, the chemical
reduction of lunar regolith simulants with hydrogen was
demonstrated, a process that can be applied to produce
water on the Moon. ProSPA is led by The Open University
(UK) under the Italian prime contractor Leonardo Finmec-
canica S.p.A.
LUVMI
The international Lunar Volatiles Mobile Instrumentation
(LUVMI) consortium of five partners from European
science and space industry cooperatively design a
mobile instrument to access and analyze lunar regolith
in permanently shadowed regions (PSR) on the Moon.
LUVMI is funded by the European Commission as part
of the program Horizon 2020 ‘Leadership in Enabling
and Industrial Technologies–Space’ and coordinated by
the Belgian company Space Applications Services. The
system consists of a mobile payload support platform (see
Figure 3) that can support a number of instruments for the
analysis of the lunar pole environment. The main features
of the instrument will be the Volatiles Sampler (VS), which
is developed by LRT, and the Volatiles Analyzer (VA),
developed by The Open University. The VS is a miniature
Figure 2. The Russian Luna-27 lander planned for 2020 to land in the
lunar South Polar Region, including the PROSPECT drill (ProSEED) and
laboratory (ProSPA) along with Russian-led sample analysis instruments
[ESA/Roscosmos].
The instrument package PROSPECT, developed under
contract to the European Space Agency (ESA) for the
upcoming Luna-27 mission to the lunar South Pole,
makes use of the gas analysis instrument ProSPA (PROS-
PECT Sample Processing and Analysis). LRT was involved
in the Phase A and Phase B study of this instrument
and supported the development of sample ovens for the
Figure 3. Artist’s view of the LUVMI rover on the lunar surface (left) and of the Volatiles Sampler instrument (right).