In a groundbreaking step towards establishing a human presence on the Moon, NASA extracted oxygen from simulated lunar soil in a "dirty" chamber with similar conditions to the Moon's environment.
During a recent test at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, scientists were able to produce oxygen from the soil in a vacuum environment for the first time, the space agency announced on Tuesday.
Soil on the Moon contains compounds that could potentially be used to produce oxygen with the help of radiation from the Sun. In order to test that out, a team of scientists from NASA's Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) created fine-grained soil to simulate the material covering the Moon's surface.
Using a high-powered laser that simulated heat from a solar energy concentrator (which is similar to a magnifying lens), the team then melted the lunar soil simulant, NASA explained. After the soil was heated, the scientists detected carbon monoxide using the Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo), a device that was designed to help scientists look for water on the Moon.
[...] The process of heating the soil and extracting the oxygen took place inside a carbothermal reactor, a device that uses high temperatures to produce carbon monoxide or dioxide on Earth to create items like solar panels and steel, according to NASA. The test was the first time the reactor was used inside the Moon-like chamber, providing possible proof that it can in fact operate in the lunar environment.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Tuesday May 02, @01:35PM (5 children)
Sure, this could be done, but I'm assuming that like so many article on here that never address the efficiency or cost of a new technology, it would be cost prohibitive.
(Score: 1) by squeedles on Tuesday May 02, @02:51PM (4 children)
I think it's more a matter of "is it possible" rather than "is it cheap" In situ resource generation has an almost infinite cost advantage compared to the cost of getting something to the moon.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02, @04:50PM (3 children)
It's clearly not infinitely expensive or even a huge problem to transport oxygen from Earth to the moon. An adult human needs about 1kg of oxygen per day, so 1 tonne of oxygen will sustain 2-3 people for an entire year.
The Apollo missions (approximate cost/launch of $1B, adjusted for inflation), excluding the mass of the lunar descent stage, landed about 5 tonnes of stuff on the moon. Presumably you could get a bit more out of a dedicated transport vehicle which does not have to carry living humans.
You'd probably want to transport the oxygen in the form of liquid water (water is about 90% oxygen by mass), as gas cylinders are comparatively inefficient. it can be separated out into oxygen and hydrogen gas by electrolysis after getting to the moon. This is how oxygen is produced on the ISS (the ISS also recycles wastewater for this process).
(Score: 1) by squeedles on Tuesday May 02, @05:25PM (2 children)
I've seen cost estimates per pound to the moon from $100k to $1.8m. Durable cargo, as opposed to fragile instruments or people, would certainly be on the low side of things. However, the process they are talking about is concentrated solar and dirt (regolith).
Once you get past the capital costs for the reactor and something to move the dirt, your inputs are basically free. So I stand by the infinite cost advantage, with a perhaps large capital cost to amortize over time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02, @10:10PM
$1.8M/pound seems an order of magnitude too expensive. $100k/pound seems the right ballpark. Even the pork-barrel SLS is ~$2B/launch, similar to the inflation-adjusted Saturn V launches, and SLS block 1 (only one flown so far) can bring about 30 tonnes of payload mass to trans-lunar injection (for comarison, the Saturn V did about 45 tonnes to TLI, soft-landing about 5 tonnes of payload on the moon). SLS block 1B will take about the same payload as the Saturn V.
The article doesn't say enough to make any kind of real cost/benefit analysis to determine whether this approach is suitable for any particular mission. I mean it is a research project, probably nobody knows, this is more of a "look at this cool stuff we're doing".
The NASA press release has slightly more detail, saying "this technology has the potential to produce several times its own weight in oxygen per year". Assuming they actually meant mass and not weight, and they are counting literally all the equipment that is required, this sounds really good but no way is that "infinitely better".
For example, let's say we want to run a 5-year mission with 5 people on the moon continuously for that period. Ignoring the possibility of recycling wastewater, we can land ~10 tonnes of water (~two Saturn V or SLS block 1B launches) to deliver enough oxygen for this mission. I'm not sure of the mass of the ISS's life support systems are by themselves, but the entire Zvezda module which supports up to 6 crew members is 20 tonnes (this has a lot more than just the life support systems). But let's ignore all that and just say we need to land 30 tonnes on the moon to provide sufficient oxygen for the mission with this approach.
On the other hand, if a complete system to extract oxygen from the lunar regolith can actually extract "several times" (let's call it 3) its own mass in oxygen gas every year, then great, we only need to land about 1 tonne of mass to provide sufficient oxygen for the mission. That's certainly very good, an order of magnitude better than 30 tonnes, but a far cry from "almost infinitely better."
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 03, @03:32AM
These $/mass rates would plummet with Starship, which is the currently chosen Moon lander.
Supporting 3-10 people on the Moon will be easy. ISRU research is for the long-term, when we start to talk about 1,000 to 5,000 geologists, engineers, and TikTok influencers working on the Moon (estimated population for Antarctica).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Tuesday May 02, @06:26PM (1 child)
Set up near the polar ice deposits, melt them and electrolyze them.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday May 02, @08:23PM
If I were running a long term moon base I'd prefer to have two distinct sources of oxygen. Redundancy good.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek