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Rocket Mining System Could Blast Ice from Lunar Craters
A mix of dust, rocks, and significant concentrations of water ice can be found inside permanently shaded lunar craters at the Moon's south pole. If that water ice can be extracted, it can be turned into breathable oxygen, rocket fuel, or water for thirsty astronauts. The extraction and purification of this dirty lunar ice is not an easy problem, and NASA is interested in creative solutions that can scale. The agency has launched a competition to solve this lunar ice mining challenge, and one of competitors thinks they can do it with a big robot, some powerful vacuums, and a rocket engine used like a drilling system. (It's what they call, brace yourself, their Resource Ore Concentrator using Kinetic Energy Targeted Mining—ROCKET M.)
This method disrupts lunar soil with a series of rocket plumes that fluidize ice regolith by exposing it to direct convective heating. It utilizes a 100 lbf rocket engine under a pressurized dome to enable deep cratering more than 2 meters below the lunar surface. During this process, ejecta from multiple rocket firings blasts up into the dome and gets funneled through a vacuum-like system that separates ice particles from the remaining dust and transports it into storage containers.
Unlike traditional mechanical excavators, the rocket mining approach would allow us to access frozen volatiles around boulders, breccia, basalt, and other obstacles. And most importantly, it's scalable and cost effective. Our system doesn't require heavy machinery or ongoing maintenance. The stored water can be electrolyzed as needed into oxygen and hydrogen utilizing solar energy to continue powering the rocket engine for more than 5 years of water excavation! This system would also allow us to rapidly excavate desiccated regolith layers that can be collected and used to develop additively manufactured structures.
[...] The Phase 1 winners are scheduled to be announced on August 13.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 19 2021, @03:57AM (6 children)
Rocket fuel requires carbon (unless you're using hydrogen rockets, which virtually nobody is because hydrogen is a bitch to store and work with). Without carbon, you've got nothing useful for the rockets that are actually positioned to dominate the (near) future of space flight.
Meanwhile, oxygen is plentiful everywhere on the moon - lunar regolith is ~40% oxygen by mass, readily accessible using the electrolytic magma refineries developed by Sadoway for NASA, for exactly that purpose. They can even produce high-purity steel as a useful byproduct, and should be tunable to also produce aluminum, magnesium, and/or titanium in smaller quantities as the technology matures.. And for orbital refueling, oxygen alone is actually really useful: 80% of the Starship's propellant mass is oxygen, if they can get that from the moon, they only need 1/5th as many refueling flights from Earth to just bring methane - which is 75% carbon by mass.
The value of lunar water is primarily *as* water, for ecological purposes.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday June 19 2021, @07:37AM (2 children)
Isn't there carbon in the r̶e̶f̶u̶e̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶e̶l̶t̶ asteroid belt? Along with gigatons of ice? We seem to have a mental block against dragging stuff from where it is plentiful, to places where it is less plentiful. All the raw materials required for space exploration are right there, waiting for us to come get them. It's almost as if the aliens in 2001 [imdb.com] planned ahead to make things easy for us.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 19 2021, @08:17AM
Rocks close to us have likely lost most of their water and the ones out far enough to be cold enough to keep it are further than Mars. Once we have a Lunar rocket fuel production facility we'll be able to go mine the asteroids, and then we won't need the Lunar one anymore.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday June 19 2021, @04:51PM
> to places where it is less plentiful.
What is the delta v required to move stuff from the asteroid belt to earth? How much fuel does it take? Fundamental inefficiency.
I guess one can use an ion drive, so long as instantaneous thrust is not required (e.g. for launch).
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday June 19 2021, @04:48PM (2 children)
Interestingly, apart from a few odd cases, lava on earth is almost all non-carbon based as well. The apparent abundance of carbon, I guess, comes from slow process of extracting trace amounts by living organisms and depositing in the crust?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava#Composition [wikipedia.org]
Carbonate volcano:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090506144317.htm [sciencedaily.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 19 2021, @06:20PM (1 child)
To be clear, the magma refinery doesn't require lunar magma - rather it works on ordinary lunar regolith that has been melted to make it more chemically responsive, in a manner very much like current aluminum refineries operate. It is actually a variation on the electrolytic steel refinery Sadoway developed for use on Earth, tweaked to operate on raw molten regolith rather than concentrated ores.
It is interesting that carbon doesn't seem to commonly mineralize without biological involvement - perhaps because it's so chemically active? It does make me wonder where exactly all the carbon ends up on a rocky planet like the moon. Seems like the cold ones often have lots of carbon-rich liquids. And then you've got Venus that's buried in a deep CO2 atmosphere. Did the Moon's carbon get blown away as volatile gasses it had insufficient gravity and magnetosphere to hold on to? Or is it trapped in deposits deep underground?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday June 20 2021, @12:40PM
> To be clear, the magma refinery doesn't require lunar magma
Thanks for the clarification - I assumed as much.
It's interesting, it seems like the early atmosphere was CO2 until 2.5 billion years ago. Assuming the lava had same composition, I guess that means the Carbon was mostly in earth's atmosphere? I guess if the moon has the same set up, then as there is no atmosphere it has no carbon source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event [wikipedia.org]
It makes sense chemically - for example limestone, when heated (as in earth's core, or early moon), breaks into CaO and CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_kiln [wikipedia.org]