Published By National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Issued about 9 years ago
US
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Summary
Description
Extracting water and volatiles from icy soils requires excavating and manipulating those soils as feedstock, but the Phoenix mission demonstrated some of the difficulties that may be encountered during such operations. The solution to these problems is an integrated mobile mining and water extraction system that uses an auger based excavation approach and an integrated water-ice extraction plant – hence, if the water-ice does sublime, it will sublime straight into the extraction system.