How to make moon dust into oxygen

Inside a giant ball, the engineers examined their equipment. In front of them, a silver -wrapped metal tool stood with colored wires, a box that hopes to produce oxygen one day on the moon.

Once the team evacuated the ball, the experiment started. The box that resembles the box now swallowed small amounts of dusty burial, which is a mixture of dust and acute gravel with a chemical composition that mimics the real lunar soil.

Soon this wealth became a globe. A layer of it is heated to temperatures more than 1650 ° C. With the addition of some interactive substances, oxygen -containing molecules began to appear.

“We have tested everything we can on the ground now,” says Brank White, Program Manager at Sierra Space Private Company. “The next step is to go to the moon.”

The Sierra Space experience at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has been revealed this summer. It is not the only technology that researchers work on, as they develop systems that can provide astronauts who live on a future lunar base.

These astronauts will need oxygen to breathe, as well as to make missile fuel for spacecraft that may start from the moon and go to further destinations, including Mars.

Residents of the lunar base may also need the metal, and they can even obtain it from the dust gray debris that scatter on the moon.

It depends a lot on whether we are able to build reactors capable of extracting such resources effectively or not.

“This can save billions of dollars in the costs of the task,” said White.

Fortunately, lunar wealth is full of mineral oxides. But while the science of extracting oxygen from mineral oxides, for example, is a good concept on Earth, doing this on the moon is much more difficult. For reasons, not the least of the circumstances.

The huge football room that hosted Sierra Space tests in July and August this year created a vacuum and also simulated the temperatures and lunar pressure.

The company says it had to improve the way the machine works over time so that it can deal better with a very coarse texture of the same richness. “It spreads everywhere, and consumes all kinds of mechanisms,” said White.

The only decisive thing that you can not test on Earth or even in orbit around our planet is lunar gravity – which is almost a sixth of the Earth’s gravity. Sierra Space may not be able to test its system on the moon until 2028 or after that, using real burial in low gravity conditions.

Paul Burke of Johns Hopkins University says the moon’s attractiveness can be a real problem for some oxygen extraction techniques unless the engineers are designed for.

In April he and his colleagues She published a paper Details of the results of the computer simulation operations that have shown how a different process of oxygen can be hindered due to the relatively weak moon’s gravity. The process was under investigation here is the electrolysis of molten richness, which includes the use of electricity to divide lunar metals that contain oxygen, in order to extract oxygen directly.

The problem is that such a technology works by forming oxygen bubbles on the surface of the electrodes in the depth of the molten burial itself. “It is the consistency of honey, for example.” It is very sticky. “

“These bubbles will not rise quickly – and they may actually delay separation from the electrodes.”

There can be ways to overcome this. One of them can be the vibration of the oxygen -making device, which may lead to the release of bubbles.

Ultra -soft electrodes may facilitate the separation of oxygen bubbles. Dr. Berk and his colleagues are now working on such ideas.

As for the Sierra Space technology, which is a carbotry process, it is different. In its case, when bubbles that contain oxygen are formed in the burial, they do so freely, not on the surface of the electrode. White says this means that there is less chance to stumble.

In confirmation of the value of the oxygen for future lunar missions, Dr. Burke estimates that the astronaut will need daily the amount of oxygen in nearly 2 or 3 kilograms of burial, depending on the fitness of the astronaut and the levels of his activity.

However, life support systems in the lunar base are likely to recycle the oxygen breathing. If so, it will not be necessary to address a great number of burials only to keep the moon’s population alive.

Dr. Berk adds that the real use of oxygen extraction techniques is to provide the oxidizing material for missile fuel, which may allow the ambitious space exploring.

It is clear that the more resources that can be provided on the moon, the better.

Sierra Space requires adding some carbon, although the company says it can recycle most of this after each oxygen production cycle.

In cooperation with his colleagues, Palac Patel, a doctorate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reached a experimental experience The electrical analysis system for molten richnessTo extract oxygen and minerals from moon soil.

“We really look at it from a point of view: Let’s try to reduce the number of re -supply tasks to a minimum,” she says.

When designing their system, Mrs. Patel and her colleagues dealt with the problem that Dr. Berk described: which is that low gravity can hinder the separation of oxygen bubbles formed on the electrodes. To face this, they used the “Sonicaore device”, which blows bubbles with sound waves to remove them.

Ms. Patel says that future resources extraction machines on the moon can derive iron, titanium, or lithium from the burial, for example. These materials may help astronauts residing on the moon in making three -dimensional printed spare parts for their lunar base or alternative ingredients for damaged spacecraft.

The benefit of the lunar wealth does not stop there. Patel notes that, in separate experiments, it dissolves the artificial burial and turned it into a dark, glass -like, glass.

She and her colleagues have reached how to convert this material into a strong hollow brick, which can be useful for building structures on the moon. A majestic black stapleHe says. Why not?