A £150,000 prize for a device that can produce clean water from icy lunar soil has been won by a pair of inventors whose solution involves a microwave oven, a motorised device for feeding woodchips into a barbecue and sound waves.
The £1.2m Aqualunar Challenge, funded by the UK Space Agency’s international bilateral fund and split between Canadian-led and UK-led teams, is designed to encourage innovative solutions to the problem of producing drinking water from ice-rich regolith – rocks and dust – around the moon’s south pole.
