A NASA-funded research team at Georgia Tech has developed a new method to extract water from the Moon’s icy polar regions using concentrated sunlight—turning one of the Moon’s biggest challenges into an energy advantage.

Led by Thom Orlando, with co-author Peter Loutzenhiser lending his solar energy expertise, the researchers are experimenting with heliostats—solar concentrating mirrors—to beam concentrated solar radiation down into the Moon’s shadowed craters. There, the heat can release water vapor from the frozen regolith, providing hydrogen and oxygen for propulsion fuels.

“We envision mounting these heliostats on the rim of the crater and then fixing them in such a way that they beam the solar irradiation down,” Loutzenhiser said. “The concentrations would be much greater than on Earth due to no attenuation, as the Moon has little to no atmosphere.”

The team’s experimental results, published in Acta Astronautica, offer a practical path toward sustainable lunar resource use and future space exploration.

Read more here: https://www.solarpaces.org/a-buried-solar-receiver-to-melt-lunar-ice/