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Researchers led by NASA's former chief technologist are hoping to launch a satellite carrying water as the source of its fuel. The team from Cornell University, guided by Mason Peck, want their device to become the first shoebox-sized "CubeSat" to orbit the moon, while demonstrating the potential of water as a source of spacecraft fuel. It's a safe, stable substance that's relatively common even in space, but could also find greater use here on Earth as we search for alternatives to fossil fuels.
Water is a way around this issue because it is essentially an energy carrier rather than a fuel. The Cornell team isn't planning to use water itself as a propellant but to rather use electricity from solar panels to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen and use them as the fuel. The two gasses, when recombined and ignited will burn or explode, giving out the energy that they took in during the splitting process. This combustion of gasses can be used to drive the satellite forward, gaining speed or altering its position in orbit of whichever desired planet or moon is the target.
Solar panels, with high reliability and no moving parts, are ideally suited to operate in zero gravity and in the extreme environments of space, producing current from sunlight and allowing the satellite to actively engage on its mission. Traditionally this energy is stored in batteries. But the Cornell scientists want to use it to create their fuel source by splitting the on-board water.
Source: http://phys.org/news/2016-09-space-rocket-fuel-power-revolution.html
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday September 30 2016, @12:31AM
If you had an easy way to make hydrogen, why not turn that hydrogen into methane? Last I checked, storing methane safely for extended periods is comparatively easy: in my own kitchen, I have some stored methane in a gas cylinder. Transporting methane long distances is also a lot easier: it's something the petroleum industry has long done. Just about any ordinary motorcar can very easily be modified to use methane as fuel instead of petrol. The analogous problems for plain hydrogen don't yet seem to have practical solutions. There seems to be something called the Sabatier reaction [wikipedia.org] which can convert H and CO2 into methane and oxygen with a nickel catalyst. Methane produced this way would be carbon-neutral, provided that the hydrogen it was made from were also carbon-neutral.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @04:56PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @12:37AM
That's what the Fischer-Tropsch process [wikipedia.org] is for. It's already being used by petroleum refineries on large scales today.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday September 30 2016, @05:45PM
An interesting idea. I would wonder though how losses to inefficiencies in the process, and the energy required to collect and concentrate CO2 to feed it, would compare to those of electrical transmission lines.