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The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has announced eight organizations that have been selected as semi-finalists for the Aqualunar Challenge.
The Aqualunar Challenge was announced on January 17 of this year by the CSA who are working in collaboration with Impact Canada from the Privy Council Office.
The challenge deals with devising a water purification solution to remove lunar contaminants from water ice that is suspected to be in large quantities in the permanently shadowed areas of the south polar region of the moon according to NASA. That water will be important for the Artemis program which will have astronauts land in the area to establish a lunar base.
As with many CSA health related initiatives, the challenge has the dual-purpose of advancing technology that could be used on Earth as well.
There are four stages to the challenge. The first is compete with organizations submitting concept designs. The second stage, the Proof of Concept, which is now underway, is to have the semi-finalists “begin developing the key components of their prototypes based on their concept design (equivalent to a TRL 3). Semi-finalists will be expected to submit video footage to demonstrate their system or components of their system and will provide a final report that outlines how their technology meets the judging criteria listed.”
The semi-finalists are:
- Canadian Space Mining Corporation (Toronto, Ontario) – LunaPure, a sustainable system to purify lunar water from the lunar polar regions
- Sixpenny Architectural Fabrication (Toronto, Ontario) – Lunarwell
- 778 Labs (Vancouver, BC) – VDO Lunar Water Purification System
- University of Calgary (Calgary, Alberta) – Pure Water from Lunar Ice: Advancing Water Purification in Space
- WaterPuris (Waterloo, Ontario) – Extracting and Purifying Water from Lunar Regolith: Innovating with Cold Trap and Vapour Membrane Distillation in an Autonomous Multi-Stage System
- Cimbus Inc. (Toronto, Ontario) – The Lunar Ice Water and Resource Recovery System (LIWARS)
- Lotic Technologies Inc. (Leduc, Alberta) – Electro-Catalytic Advanced Oxidation Process (EC-AOP) for Lunar Water Purification
- McGill University/McGill Advanced bio-Regenerative Toolkit for Long Excursion Trips (MARTLET) (Montreal, Quebec) – Polar Utilization for Future Industry Needs (PUFFIN)
Each organization will receive $22,500 “to develop the key components of their prototypes.” Four organizations will be selected from the Stage 2 to move on Stage 3 and will receive $105,000 each. The Grand Winner will receive $400,000.
Running in parallel is UK Space Agency Aqualunar Challenge which has selected 10 finalists at this point. Each of the UK finalists received £30k ($53.4K CAD). The UK winner will receive £300,000 ($534K CAD).
