 For thousands of years humans have looked to the skies with curiosity, staring at the stars and planets above. I'm here at the Open University to meet someone who's dedicated his life to the moon. Professor Mahesh Anand and his team are conducting pioneering research into extracting water from lunar rock, technology that could have huge implications for dealing with droughts on earth. Our research here at the Open University is focused on the topic of water on the moon. Water is a key resource for supporting human exploration of the solar system and therefore our focus has been to understand how much water is actually present at the lunar surface because the recent evidence has suggested that there might be a lot of water at the lunar poles as well as potentially water can be extracted from the actual lunar rocks themselves. I'm fascinated by the way in which you're thinking about applying this technology terrestrially if I understand it in regions of drought. Can you maybe speak about your hopes for what this research and technology might mean for living on earth? So something that is quite fascinating about space exploration that it actually forces you to challenge your comfort zone. So you have to go out of your comfort zone to actually come up with new and innovative solutions. In this case we are trying to develop a technology that could one day be extracting water from the actual lunar samples but the point is that in order to extract that water you need to develop those technologies that we had not thought about before. The hope is that one day we will find a direct application here on earth to improve the quality of life for fellow human beings. Professor Mahesh's work is cosmic and inspiring. His team are working with NASA and some of the top scientists around the world. What really excites me about their research is the way in which it might help solve some of the greatest sustainability challenges we have here on earth. If you would like to find out more about research projects or courses at the Open University go to open.ac.uk