ESA lists a Tekniker project amongst its most outstanding achievements reported in 2022

Every year, the European Space Agency (ESA) describes several of the organisation’s most outstanding achievements in its ´ESA highlights 2022´ report. This year, the agency included the HISRU project led by Tekniker whose aim is develop a reactor that can take advantage of environmental conditions on Mars to produce methane to be used as rocket fuel.

The publication features outer space photographs and infographics to depict the agency’s activities in different areas of the space sector.

The HISRU project, in which the University of Cantabria is also involved, has been listed amongst the initiatives that were funded by ESA between February and April, specifically under the section covering innovative technologies that could be useful for future exploration missions on Mars.  

In the unit allocated to this initiative, Borja Pozo, the coordinator of the space sector at Tekniker, explains the development of the reactor prototype to transform grey water originating from domestic chores performed by astronauts (plus carbon dioxide) into methane with the help of solar light. Methane, in its liquid form, provides a powerful rocket fuel.

Once the prototype reactor has been fully developed, the team will focus on substantially improving it. Nowadays, and during compensation developments and without even having optimised the system, the researchers have improved system efficiency by 6.55% and methane production 46.7%, "figures clearly higher than above the levels reported for the current state of the art applied to systems of this kind". The team is working to develop a prototype that will be tested to verify how well it can cope with simulated Mars dust, an element that is always present in the planet’s atmosphere.

You can access the report here in its interactive format (page 29) and in PDF (page 44).