Multi-disciplinary space mission design team recognized for their super-sorting prototype

For the 13th year straight, a team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was selected to present their space mission design at NASA’s annual Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage competition. RASC-AL is a NASA competition team that develops the entire, big-picture, systems-level mission design. This year’s mission was to develop lunar technologies that leverage materials available on the moon.  

The team was made up of students from 13 disciplines – nine departments in The Grainger College of Engineering were represented including aerospace, chemical, electrical, physics, civil, systems, nuclear, mechanical and computer engineering. Students from other units on campus came from astronomy, data science, mathematics and astrophysics. Remarkably, all but four of the 30-some team members were first- and second-year students.

This year’s project manager was 3rd-year aerospace engineering student Hannah Speranza.  She said many of the other teams selected to present, and they compete against, are made up of master’s and Ph.D. students or senior design teams.

“We're consistently the youngest team at the competition,” Speranza said. “All of our sub leads were first-year students except Suhani Verma who was a 2^nd- year student in astrophysics. She is the project manager for this year’s team. The challenge for such a young team is they've never taken any type of structural analysis course or even a dynamics course and they're learning it all on the fly while developing a new concept and trying to describe it.”

The team developed MATRIX – Mining and Advanced Transformation of Regolith for Infrastructure and eXpansion. The challenge assumes services such as power, communications and landers are present so they don’t need to develop those.

“The first semester was all researching in-situ resource utilization – what can we use that’s already on the moon or available to us. We were able to adapt some systems that already existed, such as the RASSOR or IPEX rover for mining.”

The second semester is when the bulk of the design takes shape. Speranza said the team realized that to make a launching/landing pad and other structures, they could use sintered tiles, which are made with heat and pressure. To make the tiles they would use something there was plenty of on the moon – dust, called regolith.

“For our technology demonstration, we had to prove we can mine regolith, sort it, get out of it the products that we want – oxygen, titanium, aluminum, silicon – and 3D print a structure on the moon using concrete.

“The ‘R’ in RASC-AL stands for revolutionary and I think our best brand-new idea was our storage and refinement payload. It’s a seven-step system to sort the regolith into multiple sizes, some of which is used to optimize the packing density to create sulphur regolith concrete and sintered tiles, and the other part was used to increase the efficiency of the extraction of elements from the regolith.”

Speranza said the sorting system was inspired by a technique used in the food industry, specifically to sort Brazil nuts. The team built a prototype of their size beneficiator, demonstrated it at the competition and tied for the Best Prototype award.

“It was the workhorse of our architecture because everything we were developing needed size-sorted regolith. It uses vibrations to make the larger particles sort up and smaller particles sort down. We were able to sort a spoonful of regolith in a couple seconds into four different size groups, which is insanely fast.”

Watch a video of the size beneficiator in action.

When the team conducted a back-end analysis, their limiting factor was their mining speed, not their sorting speed.

“Often the sorting system is the bottleneck, but not for us. Bringing it to the site was our bottleneck. We really couldn't do it much faster with our architecture planned.”

Speranza said designing a full solar concentrator was also a key part of their system because it was used to sinter the tiles and heat the regolith to remove the volatiles such as oxygen, hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

“It was used to heat our crucible, which is where we did molten regolith electrolysis. That’s where we got our metal slurry because it was very hot. From there, it was cooled in our vacuum distillation chamber, which took advantage of the fact being on the moon in a vacuum.”

She said a large challenge was making sure all the steps of the process interacted and coordinated well as one fully functioning system.

Speranza said she is grateful for RASC-AL’s successful history of being selected to present at the forum.

“The prompt and the team members are different every year, but the groundwork has been critiqued and refined over the years, making us a well-oiled machine.”

The team’s advisors were faculty members Victoria Coverstone, Robyn Woollands and Matt Hausman and graduate student advisor Michael Harrigan and Didier Gossard from the Léonard de Vinci Graduate School of Engineering.

Team members from aerospace engineering include Risa Bhaumik, Sharvesh Bhupathy, Marco Calso Sarabia, Archita Chopra, Niloufar Forghani, Brianna Hopf, Aaron Kossack, Xien Liao, Maximillian Qi, Hannah Speranza, Chris Stukel and Jeehyung Yoo.

Team members who are majoring in other fields include Qatrin Andina, civil engineering; Ashton Burov, chemical engineering; Eden Elfassy, systems engineering; Thomas Han, astrophysics; Dasha Kediarova, electrical engineering; Abhiram Manuguri, computer science and astronomy; Jackson Michel, nuclear engineering, Joyce Nam, astronomy and data science; Vaari Patel, mathematics; Ishan Ramesh, physics; Theodore Raditya, computer engineering; Leopold Rehlinger, mechanical engineering; Christopher Soriano, nuclear engineering; Suhani Verma, astrophysics; and Bo Zeleznik, astrophysics.