348,000 To Test Its Technology For Processing Moon Soil

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Headlines:

• "NASA's Ardently Studying Moon Rocks to Unravel Moon's Origins" (Source: NASA)

• "ESA's Gaia Spacecraft Maps Out the Moon's Deep Interior" (Source: European Space Agency)

• "NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Captures High-Resolution Images of Moon's Surface" (Source: NASA)

• "China's Chang'e 4 Mission Successfully Lands on Far Side of Moon" (Source: Xinhua News Agency)

• "India's Chandrayaan-1 Mission Reveals Moon's Hidden Water Ice" (Source: Indian Space Research Organisation)

• "Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Tests New Lunar Lander Throne" (Source: The Verge)

• "SpaceX's Starship Program Aims to Send Humans to Moon by 2024" (Source: Space. com)

• "ESA's Moon Village Architecture Competition Winners Announced" (Source: European Space Agency)

• "Russia's Luna-25 Mission to Return Soil Samples from Moon's Surface" (Source: TASS News Agency) These bullet points highlight various news headlines and space missions related to space exploration, "technology.".. and the study of the moon.

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Seattle-based Interlune has received a $348,000 grant from NASA to test its system for processing lunar soil on a series of reduced-gravity airplane flights — marking one more small step toward harvesting helium-3 and other resources on the moon.

The project is one of 11 selected for funding through NASA's TechFlights program , which supports space technology testing on suborbital rockets, rocket-powered landers or airplane-based platforms.

Interlune's system is known as CRUMBLE — an acronym that stands for "Comminution of Regolith Using Milling for Beneficiation of Lunar Extract." Basically, the system would break down lunar dirt and rock, or regolith, and make it easier to extract potentially valuable ingredients such as helium-3.

The TechFlights grant will fund parabolic flights provided by Zero Gravity Corp. to see which kinds of equipment would work best in the airless, reduced-gravity conditions present on the moon's surface. Interlune would use simulated moon dirt to put prototypes for its CRUMBLE processor through their paces.

""We are writing a new playbook for how public-private partnerships can deliver world-changing innovation to benefit all," Interlune co-founder and CEO Rob Meyerson said today in a news release . "This award is one more step toward our goal of rebuilding the entire U.S. industrial base for lunar exploration."

Eventually, Interlune aims to put its moondirt-processing system on rovers to harvest resources from the moon's surface — much as combines harvest grain from earthly fields . Such resources could help sustain settlements on the moon or get shipped back to Earth.

Meyerson and his Interlune teammates point to helium-3 as the resource most likely to be worth extracting. That particular isotope of helium is more plentiful on the moon's surface than it is on Earth, and it can be used for applications including quantum computing , medical imaging , nuclear material detection and fusion power .