Update, 16 June 2016: The ExoMars rover is now scheduled for launch in 2020
Drink up. The first moisture farm on Mars will be part of a mission blasting off in 2018.
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Earlier this year, Javier Martin-Torres of Lule氓 University of Technology in Kiruna, Sweden, and his colleagues reported results from NASA鈥檚 Curiosity rover suggesting that liquid water pools just beneath the surface of Mars at night before evaporating during the day.
The team has designed an instrument called HABIT to measure and test this process, and ESA has now approved its use on ExoMars, the joint mission between ESA and Russia to send a rover and lander to Mars in 2018.
HABIT will use salts to absorb 5聽millilitres of water from the atmosphere a day, and it can hold up to 25聽 millilitres in total. That might not sound like much, but if the process works, it can easily be scaled up to provide water for future crewed missions to Mars, says Martin-Torres.
鈥淗ABIT can be easily adapted to 鈥榳ater-farms鈥� for in-situ resource production,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e will produce Martian liquid water on Mars, that could be used in the future exploration of Mars for astronauts and greenhouses.鈥�
Self-sustaining
The team estimates that HABIT will cycle through 50 litres of water during one Martian year. 鈥淭his cyclical and natural separation process that extracts pure water is key for future applications,鈥� says Martin-Torres. 鈥淚t requires no extra energy, is self-sustained, and the resulting dry salts are ready again for the next cycle in the process.鈥�
The instrument will be mounted on a static lander, where it will also act as a weather station, measuring the local temperature and relative humidity to help develop models of the Martian atmosphere. It will also have a container to capture falling atmospheric dust, to see if dust levels change with the Martian seasons.
Meanwhile, an instrument on another Mars mission has run into trouble. NASA鈥檚 InSight lander, due to launch next March, is designed to measure seismic movements beneath the planet鈥檚 surface.
It is equipped with seismometers designed by the French space agency (CNES), which are enclosed inside a vacuum chamber that now seems to have sprung a leak. NASA and CNES are working to fix the problem and hope to still make the March launch date.
Image credit: ESA
