The challenge is to develop, also by means of self-propagating chemical reactions under microgravity conditions, like those ones on the Moon new processes for manned space exploration. The objective: to allow manned space missions to extract and to utilize in-situ resources like oxygen and nitrogen necessary for human survival without being equipped with huge amount of supplies and to utilize specific tools to repair lunar and/or martian platforms also using in-situ materials, without going necessarily back to the Earth.
This is the brief identity card of COSMIC (Combustion Synthesis under Microgravity Conditions) project which will be developed at the University of Cagliari, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica e Materiali, where the project coordinator Prof. Giacomo Cao works. The involved partners are: Dipartimento Energia e Trasporti of CNR, Centro di Ricerca Sviluppo e Studi Superiori in Sardegna (CRS4), Istituto Tecnico Industriale ‘Enrico Fermi’ (Cosenza), COREM srl, Esplora srl and SpaceLand srl. COSMIC, the first Italian project sponsored by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) in the framework of the manned space exploration, will develop research activities and technological innovation not only for the manned exploration, but particularly for the technology transfer in favour of several applications to be performed on the Earth, in the framework of which suitable spin-offs are foreseen through the propagation of the financial support allowed at this stage. The research activity will be also dedicated to the evaluation of both the physico-chemical and structural characteristics of the products obtained by means of the developed processes, and specific parameters such as initial mixture composition or reactants particle size. One of the objectives is to verify if the suppression of sedimentation and buoyancy phenomena under microgravity conditions will allow the development of new processes whose final products are characterized by microstructural, mechanical and thermo-chemical properties unique or superior with respect to terrestrial analogues. In brief to understand how and how much processes and related products are dissimilar under microgravity conditions. Suitable parabolic flights will allow one to test the proposed processes under simulated lunar gravity.
