Politecnico di Milano
Italian technical university covered here only for its named role as a subcontractor, with OHB System AG and BlueHorizon, in the OHB Italia-led team contracted by ESA in 2018 to define the technology-demonstrator payload for ESA's Lunar ISRU Demonstration Mission, which was then expected to fly in 2025. An undated OHB Italia page also credits OHB Italia and the university with ground experiments in that programme in which a system fed with sand simulating polar lunar soil produced the expected amount of water. The sources reviewed establish a payload-definition study and Earth-based simulant tests only: no flight hardware, no extraction on the Moon, and no current status of the mission.
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Facts
- Headquarters
- Italy
- Type
- Research institution
- Status
- UnknownStatus date not recorded. The documented resource roles are a March 2018 payload-definition study and an undated company-attributed simulant experiment. OHB's news-page date is 1 March and its PDF dateline is 5 March 2018. This scoped review does not establish a separately dated current institutional or contract status; unknown does not mean inactive.
- Roles
- Processing / ISRU
- Targets
- Moon
Open evidence gaps
- Publication date conflict kept: OHB Italia's news page lists the release as 1 March 2018 and its PDF carries the dateline 'Bremen / Milano, 5th March 2018'.
- The 2018 release is a payload-definition study contract; no source reviewed records flight hardware. The 2025 flight expectation is a 2018 statement, not a current plan; the mission's current status is on ESA lunar ISRU demonstration mission (oxygen-from-regolith payload; not flown) and was not re-checked here.
- The undated OHB Italia instruments page does not say when the simulant experiments were run, who carried out which part, or what apparatus was used; 'produced the expected amount of water' is a company statement of a ground test, not extraction on the Moon.
- No university-authored page about the 2018 study was retrieved; its official home page supports name and country. Existing ORACLE evidence explicitly identifies Politecnico di Milano as the Phase A/B1 partner in October 2024. Its role after the 2025 industrial contract is not stated. This profile's summary remains limited to the 2018 study and simulant experiments.
- A snippet-only abstract from a 2018 conference record was not captured and is not used.
- Founding year left null although the university home page says 'Since 1863': the page does not say that was the founding year.
Sources
9 excerpts from 5 publicationsOne web address counts as one publication.
A team led by OHB Italia SpA as prime and with subcontractors OHB System AG, Germany, Politecnico di Milano and the OHB spin-off BlueHorizon, Luxembourg, is in charge of the definition of the technology demonstrator payload.
OHB Italia has been awarded a contract by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the definition of the payload for the Lunar ISRU Demonstration Mission (ISRU DM), expected to be flown in 2025.
1 March 2018
Bremen / Milano, 5th March 2018.
The experiments were conducted by OHB Italia S.p.A. as Prime Contractor and the Politecnico di Milano in the frame of the In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) Demonstration Mission
The system powered with sand simulating polar lunar soil, produced the expected amount of water
Since 1863, Italy's largest science-technology university
Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano
The partner for the in-progress Phase A/B1 is the Politecnico di Milano
Cite this record
SpaceMiningData, “Politecnico di Milano”, dataset version a00fa2c68a45, built 2026-11-11, https://spaceminingdata.com/organizations/politecnico-di-milano.html. Record checked 2026-10-31.