I am trying to see if the community would be interested in brainstorming the current NASA challenge. Early in the process of anything like this a lot of voices with even just a casual interest can lead to interesting avenues to explore. So please just throw out crazy ideas, they may not be as crazy as you think. Do not be daunted, this challenge is basically a table top exercise. They are looking for a plan more then the specific hardware. They want some hardware descriptions (the more detailed the better), but that is more to judge the feasibility then actual hardware. Also be aware a tremendous amount of work has been done and a lot is available on the internet.
The basics of the challenge are: NASA will land your equipment on a pretty flat place near the south pole. Your task is to get to a crater whose bottom is always in darkness where they expect to find water. There mine enough of the dirt to extract that water and get it back to the landing area. To help NASA will provide a power plant and a cord (power distribution) long enough to reach. If you want an extraction plant also.
How we would do this is up to us.
Water will be very important for any extended lunar presence so while this challenge is pretty narrow. In the long run a lot of the ideas presented will probably be used. In reality permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) will be an important resource for more then just water. So an extraction plant will actually turn out to be a whole processing plant.
A lot of work has already been done. For example this image is from a paper: MICROWAVE PROCESSING OF LUNAR SOIL discussing the problems an opportunities of lunar dust. Look how simple that is. The parts are basically off the shelf, the microwave source is pretty much what you probably have in your house right now. But if you need to build a road, here is a pretty simple way. You can certainly see something like this being pulled behind a rover on its way to the crater. Just in my first post some good ideas popped up. lurknomore chimed in with Solar reflectors. The certainly are a real possibility as Solar Thermal melting of the Regolith for a variety of applications is of real ongoing research. OneManAnthill brought up solar thermal also but also introduced electrostatic separation, the electrostatic properties of the regolith are important and one of the problems that need to be overcome or the property could be an advantage. culhwtch brought in the advantages of lunar gravity and expanded on several problems and solutions. Jason Of Argo introduced pipes as a transport possibility for the water vapor.
At this point even just big questions need to be thought about. Should we treat this as a one off? NASA is willing to throw away a lot of stuff early on. While this challenge implies a longer effort it is not framed that way. What balance between extracting the water and building the infrastructure (if any) should be struct? What should we bring and what should we make in place? Of course there is a lot more.
This is basically a directed open thread.