Dr. Julie Kleinhenz of the National Center for Space Exploration Research, supporting REC, was selected for the Best Paper by a Young Professional Award by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Northern Ohio Section, for the paper she presented at the AIAA 47th Aerospace Sciences Meeting in Orlando in January 2009.
The paper is entitled, “Development of a Reactor for the Extraction of Oxygen and Volatiles from Lunar Regolith,” by Julie Kleinhenz, Zengguang Yuan, Kurt Sacksteder and John Caruso, paper number AIAA 2009-1203. This paper summarizes the work that Julie led to develop a small scale reactor to both extract lunar volatiles, such as water, and chemically bound oxygen, all from lunar regolith simulants.
The reactor was delivered by GRC to the In-Situ Resource Utilization project as part of the Regolith and Environmental Science: Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE) effort which completed a highly successful demonstration of regolith collection and processing at the Hawaii analog test site on Mauna Kea in November, 2009.
