Gloucestershire company wins prize for inventing way to produce clean water on moon

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.“Nasa has set the goal of establishing a permanent crewed base on the moon by the end of the decade,” said Meganne Christian, a reserve astronaut and commercial exploration lead at the UK Space Agency who is also the chair of the Aqualunar Challenge judging panel. “Astronauts will need a reliable supply of water for drinking and growing food, as well as oxygen for air and hydrogen for fuel.” However, extracting water is tricky. Temperatures on the moon can fall as...