PARAGON SPACE DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: Z12

Description

Paragon proposes developing the conceptual design of the thermal control system (TCS) for an in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) Collector of Ice in a Cold Lunar Environment (ICICLE), a Cold Trap for collecting and purifying water from sublimation mining of water-ice or filtration thereof from the permanently shadowed regions (PSR) of the lunar poles. Cold trap collection and filtration of water from various lunar ice mining architectures is relatively undeveloped. This Cold Trap must be able to interface with the extraction methods as well as downstream processing systems, such as Paragonrsquo;s in-development ISRU-derived water purification and Hydrogen Oxygen Production (IHOP) subsystem. A well-designed Cold Trap will selectively freeze out and collect water vapor from the volatile inputs, rejecting the corrosive, toxic, and explosive contaminant gases found with water in the lunar regolith. Thermal management system technologies or a combination thereof in the ICICLE Cold Trap will be required to achieve both the desired water purity and collection rates, while also being able to interface with upstream and downstream systems from both process and mechanical perspectives. To this end, this proposal will explore the tradespace of conceptual designs to meet these wide ranging performance and architecture needs, the most practical of which will be down-selected, refined, and thermally modeled for a prototype demonstration in Phase II of the ICICLE program.