SOLAR PRODUCTION OF FUELS AND COMMODITIES

The project ALCHEMIST is the first ESA payload study that defines the high level details of a lunar ISRU payload operating with the hydrogen reduction process.
Every three years, the ESA Council on Ministerial The European Space Agency (ESA) planned to propose to the Council (among many others) a mission with the purpose of demonstrating In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) on the Moon. ISRU means that local resources, especially minerals, are used to produce useful goods like air (oxygen), wa-ter, metals, construction materials, or rocket propellant.
To prepare the proposal, ESA issued several ITTs (Invitations To Tender) to do detailed preparatory studies about the mission, divided into the segments transportation, com-munication, and payload, this project is among them. Alchemist main objectives are to define the hardware of a hydrogen reduction plant operating on the Moon. This includ-ed the sub-systems for excavation of the lunar sand (regolith), the pre-processing like sieving or enrichment, the processing of the regolith with hydrogen at 900°C, and the fluid management for the hydrogen supply, recirculation, and extraction and storage of the product water. Goal of the mission is to produce 100g of water from lunar regolith.

Space Applications Services (Belgium), CIEMAT-PSA (Spain), Airbus Defense and Space (Germany), SINTEF (Norway), Abengoa (Spain), Aavid Thermacore (UK), Technical Uni-versity of Munich (Germany), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands), Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques (France), Centre Terre et Pierre (Bel-gium), CBK (Poland)