October 2018
Sustainable ways of living on the Moon and Mars
... believe that fuel, air, food and power supplies will need to be locally sourced. So how realistic is the in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) approach? Nick Spall considers the possibilities of ‘living off the land’ on other worlds by applying...
May 2021
In-situ propellant design for Mars ascent vehicles
...future long-term Mars missions are to be sustainable, we need to develop propulsion systems that utilise locally available in-situ resources from which propellants can be derived. The authors discuss the requirements for a practical rocket system for...
23 April 2021
Mars rover instrument, MOXIE, extracts first oxygen from Red Planet
... will help future missions “live off the land,” using elements of another world’s environment, also known as in-situ resource utilization. “It’s taking regolith, the substance you find on the ground, and putting it through a processing plant, making...
17 May 2021
European startup to produce oxygen from lunar soil for ESA 2025 mission
... the agency’s up and coming in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) demonstration mission in 2025. ISRU involves the .... Enabling spacecraft to “fill up” in space with locally sourced resources, such as oxygen, will play a key role in the exploration...
14 January 2019
New steam-powered asteroid hopper that could run 'forever'
... we don’t have to wait for years as a new spacecraft travels from Earth each time.” Honeybee are no stranger to in-situ resource utilisation systems, and have in the past received a number of NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards...
March 2016
Resource Prospector – a Lunar Pathfinder
... cannot fail, their success must be assured…which is expensive! The result is that mission designers spend a lot of resources attempting to assure a mission succeeds because it is too expensive to tolerate failure. However, there are ways to help...
