SCIENTIFIC & PLANETARY INSTRUMENTS
ISRU
ISRU Demonstrator Payload is aimed for the extraction of oxygen from lunar regolith on lunar surface. The experiments were conducted by OHB Italia S.p.A. as Prime Contractor and the Politecnico di Milano in the frame of the In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) Demonstration Mission, a program of and funded by ESA, the European Space Agency, with the strong support of ASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana).
The system powered with sand simulating polar lunar soil, produced the expected amount of water, extracting oxygen from the oxides present in the minerals of lunar surface. The thin layer of dusty sand that covers the Moon contains minerals that are also found on Earth, allowing the use of chemical transformation processes known from terrestrial industrial applications.
The ability to produce water in-situ and therefore oxygen and hydrogen, is a key step for future Moon’s human missions, as these are fundamental elements for sustaining the life for extended periods. This production capability also frees future lunar bases from the use of open-loop systems that require continuous refuelling from Earth, simplifying logistics and reducing the costs of transporting materials.
Under a programme of and funded by the European Space Agency. The view expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Space Agency
LISA MISSION
LISA is one of the large-class missions under ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025. It will be the first space-based observatory dedicated to studying gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time emitted during the most powerful events in the Universe, such as pairs of black holes coming together and merging, just to investigate the entire history of the Universe using similar waves.
OHB Italia S.p.A., on behalf of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), will be the industrial architect responsible of the so-called GRS, Gravitational Reference System, which is the “golden heart” of the mission. Th GRS purpose is to ensure that a 2kg Gold-Platinum cubical mass can be released as a free-falling object in Space, undisturbed by any possible external influence, and very precisely controlled in its behaviour, in order to identify the influence of gravitational waves down to sub-Hertz frequencies, a bandwidth previously impossible to study using any ground interferometric experiment.
