Scientists Are Microwaving Moon Ice to Make Drinkable Water

You’re going to need water if you’re planning on living on the moon or any other cosmic body openly hostile to human life. To that end, a British tech company has come up with a clever water purification system that promises to turn lunar ice into drinkable water with what is ostensibly a microwave.

The UK’s space agency funded a contest called the Aqualunar Challenge, an international prize awarded to technologies that can purify water from the ice on our moon’s surface. The company by the name of Naicker Scientific won with its SonoChem System, which uses microwaves and ultrasound to rapidly generate millions of tiny bubbles and melted lunar ice that eventually produces clean, drinkable water that someone is absolutely going to market as a health fad and charge exorbitant prices for once they find a way to ship it to Earth.

The Moon’s south pole technically has water, but it’s frozen solid in the soil. Astronauts would need to haul water from Earth or even recycle their own water (in the form of, you know, pee) without a reliable source on the moon. If only we could figure out how to extract the water from the lunar surface and then purify it.

That’s what the SonoChem System does. It’s a microwave that uses sound waves to form bubbles in lunar ice water that can generate enough heat and pressure to produce free radicals, which purify the water.

All of that makes the process sound much easier than it will actually be. Lolan Naicker, the technical director of Naicker Scientific, put it bluntly: “Imagine digging up the soil in your back garden in the middle of winter and trying to extract frozen water to drink. Now imagine doing it in an environment that is -200°C, a nearly perfect vacuum, under low gravity, and with very little electrical power. That’s what we will have to overcome on the Moon.”

Just like home insulation, memory foam mattresses, and smoke detectors, the SonoChem is being developed for space missions, but its uses could extend down here onto Earth, helping fight scarcity in areas affected by water shortages.