Since winning the prestigious ESA Payload Masters IOD/IOV opportunity onboard the TEC Nyx Orbital Flight Vehicle (OFV) in June 2023, the Hydromars team has been working hard with the design and development of the Hydro4M2.
To our best knowledge, Hydro4M2 is the first device being developed to test and validate in-orbit Thermal Pervaporation (TO) in order to support the development of future full-scale extraterrestrial water treatment systems.
In addition to solving non-trivial challenges which always accompany space-grade hardware, including structural, electromagnetic, thermal and material compliance, Hydromars also aims to achieve its goal in < 11 months between design conception and orbital testing. Moreover, Hydromars has managed to significantly downscale the process to comply with the mission constraints and is now actively procuring flight components for assembly and environmental testing scheduled in Q2 2024.
Hydro4M2 is subdivided into the process, thermal, electrical and data, and structural subsystems which require individual analyses but are ultimately closely coupled.
The following gives an understanding of the development timeline:
Hydro4M2 contains more than 40 components, with many of them containing multiple subcomponents.
During the flight, we aim to measure several parameters of interest such as conductivity, temperature, pressure and possibly a visual feed of the flow phenomena in microgravity.
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