Water Condensation Module for Asteroid Mining

Karman+, the project sponsor, aims to mine asteroids to harvest valuable materials from space. One of their goals is to mine asteroids rich in water. Water is an essential resource in space because it can be used for fuel via hydrolysis or for human life support as the space economy grows. Karman+’s asteroid mining spacecraft processes asteroid regolith and produces steam in a cyclic manner. Because it is more efficient to store steam in its liquid phase, Karman+ required the development of a module to condense steam into water at a rate equivalent to 7.14 kg/day. A passive, cyclic steam cooling system to cool the steam and manage the resulting water in a microgravity environment was then developed. By utilizing passive cooling, the module accomplishes its task without adding additional heat loads to Karman+’s reactor. After developing and manufacturing the physical prototype, test bench, actuator, and complementary electronics and firmware, isobaric and isochoric steam cooling tests were conducted on the manufactured prototype. The prototype can remove 225W of heat in the lab setting, exceeding the energy equivalent of the given throughput requirement. By developing a lab-like thermal simulator in SolidWorks capable of reproducing experimental thermal gradients under space-like thermal conditions, a space-like simulation tool to predict the module's system requirements in space was created. With this information, Karman+ can perform informed trade-off studies across system properties, including thermal management, power consumption, radiator area, and operating temperature.

Collaborators: Zachary Ditzel, Adam Hunt, Nicholas Rutigliano, Holden Johnson, Eva Weiland