Update, 16 June 2016: The ExoMars rover is now scheduled for launch in 2020

Drink up. The first moisture farm on Mars will be part of a mission blasting off in 2018.

Earlier this year, Javier Martin-Torres of Luleå University of Technology in Kiruna, Sweden, and his colleagues reported results from NASA’s Curiosity rover suggesting that liquid water pools just beneath the surface of Mars at night before evaporating during the day.


The team has designed an instrument called HABIT to measure and test this process, and ESA has now approved its use on ExoMars, the joint mission between ESA and Russia to send a rover and lander to Mars in 2018.

HABIT will use salts to absorb 5 millilitres of water from the atmosphere a day, and it can hold up to 25 millilitres in total. That might not sound like much, but if the process works, it can easily be scaled up to provide water for future crewed missions to Mars, says Martin-Torres.

“HABIT can be easily adapted to ‘water-farms’ for in-situ resource production,” he says. “We will produce Martian liquid water on Mars, that could be used in the future exploration of Mars for astronauts and greenhouses.”

Self-sustaining

The team estimates that HABIT will cycle through 50 litres of water during one Martian year. “This cyclical and natural separation process that extracts pure water is key for future applications,” says Martin-Torres. “It requires no extra energy, is self-sustained, and the resulting dry salts are ready again for the next cycle in the process.”

The instrument will be mounted on a static lander, where it will also act as a weather station, measuring the local temperature and relative humidity to help develop models of the Martian atmosphere. It will also have a container to capture falling atmospheric dust, to see if dust levels change with the Martian seasons.

Meanwhile, an instrument on another Mars mission has run into trouble. NASA’s InSight lander, due to launch next March, is designed to measure seismic movements beneath the planet’s surface.

It is equipped with seismometers designed by the French space agency (CNES), which are enclosed inside a vacuum chamber that now seems to have sprung a leak. NASA and CNES are working to fix the problem and hope to still make the March launch date.

Image credit: ESA