How to make moon dust in oxygen

Within a giant field, the engineers distributed their equipment. In front of them, they stand a silver metal wiping in colored wires – a box that they hope to make one day of oxygen on the moon.

Once the team evacuated the field, the experience started. The box that resembles the box now was eating small quantities of dusty Reggulith-a mixture of dust and acute gravel with a chemical composition that mimics the real lunar soil.

Soon, Reggoleeth Globe was. A layer of it is heated to temperatures more than 1650 ° C. With the addition of some interactive materials, the molecules that contain oxygen began to go out.

“We have tested everything we can on the ground now,” says Brant White, the program manager at Sierra Space Company, a private company. “The next step is to go to the moon.”

The Sierra Space experience at NASA's Johnson Space Center was revealed this summer. It is far from this only technology that researchers work, as they develop systems that can provide astronauts who live on the future of the moon's future.

These astronauts will need oxygen to breathe, but also to make missile fuel for the spacecraft that may start from the moon and head to destinations further – including Mars.

Residents of the moon base may also require minerals and even harvesting this from the raging gray debris that wears the surface of the moon.

Many depend on whether we can build reactors capable of extracting such resources effectively or not.

“It may save billions of dollars of task costs,” says Mr. White, who explains that the alternative – which brings a lot of oxygen and spare minerals to the moon.

Fortunately, the lunar recolith is full of mineral oxides. But while the science of extracting oxygen from mineral oxides, for example, is well understood on Earth, doing this on the moon's surface is more difficult. Not least due to circumstances.

The huge football room that hosted Sierra space tests in July and August this year caused a vacuum and also simulated the temperatures and pressure of the moon.

The company says it had to improve how the machine works over time so that it can overcome the most abstract and detector texture. “It reaches everywhere, wearing all kinds of mechanisms,” says Mr. White.

The decisive thing, which you cannot test on Earth or even in orbit around our planet is lunar gravity – which is nearly the sixth Earth. Until 2028, or later, it may not be that the Sierra Space can test its system on the moon, using real Reagole in low gravitational conditions.

Paul Burke says at Johns Hopkins University that the moon's attractiveness may be a real problem for some oxygen extraction techniques unless the engineers are designed.

In April, he and his colleagues She published a paper In detail, the results of the computer simulation that showed how the process of extracting the various oxygen can be hindered due to the relatively weak gravity. The process was under investigation here is the molten electrolysis, which includes the use of electricity to divide lunar metals that contain oxygen, in order to extract oxygen directly.

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

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

There can be ways to this. One can vibrate with the oxygen -making machine, which may shake the bubbles empty.

The additional additional poles may make it easy for oxygen bubbles to separate. Dr. Berk and his colleagues are now ideas like this.

Sierra Space technology, which is a different thermal process. In their case, when the bubbles containing oxygen in the Reagole are formed, they do so freely, instead of the surface of the electrode. This means that there is less chance of stumbling, says Mr. White.

With the emphasis on the value of the oxygen for future lunar campaigns, Dr. Berk estimates that, a day, the astronaut of the amount of oxygen in nearly a kilogram or three kilograms of regislet requires, depending on the levels of fitness and the activity of the astronaut.

However, life support systems at the base of the moon are likely to recycle the oxygen breathed by astronauts. If so, it will not be necessary to treat much of the Reagate only to keep the moon's inhabitants alive.

Dr. Berk, the real use of oxygen extraction techniques, adds in providing oxidation for missile fuel, which can allow the ambitious space exploring.

Obviously, the more resources that can be manufactured on the surface of 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.

Along with colleagues, Palak Patel, a doctorate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reached a pilot Reagole electrolysis systemTo extract oxygen and minerals from lunar soil.

“We are really looking at it from a point of view,” she says.

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

Ms. Patel says that future resource extraction machines on the moon can derive iron, titanium or lithium from the Reagole, for example. These materials in the astronauts who evaluate the moon may help make a three -dimensional printed spare parts for the lunar base or the replacement components of the damaged spacecraft.

The lunar recolith interest does not stop there. Mrs. Patel notes that, in separate experiments, the Reggulith dissolved a simulation in a difficult and dark material similar to the glass.

She and his colleagues have worked on how to convert this material into a strong, hollow brick, which may be useful for building structures on the moon's surface – Black Meloma imposedHe says. Why not?