British engineers develop process to turn moon dust into oxygen
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NASA page on In-Situ Resource Utilization: https://www.nasa.gov/isru
NASA Swamp Works: https://technology-ksc.ndc.nasa.gov/featurestory/swampworks
Dr. Phil Metzger, who worked for a long time at Swamp Works before taking a research position at a university. Still very much involved in processing regolith and moon bases. https://twitter.com/DrPhiltill
NASA also hosts an annual competition around regolith collection called the NASA Lunabotics Competition. The last 2 years have been a little rough, with a cancellation due to government furloughs, then a cancellation due to the pandemic. Swamp Works engineers, technicians, and machinists attend and are often judges. Where they might make 1 or 2 prototypes per year, they're able to see 30-50 different designs and see their performance. The rules are setup to penalize activity similar to the incentives NASA has. Low bandwidth usage, high material collection, and low vehicle weight are all rewarded. https://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/centers/kennedy/techn...
Alabama has had a very good run, accomplishing fully autonomous 10 minute competition runs, avoiding rocks, having a really great systems engineering approach.
There has also been a competition in Hawaii on Mauna Kea periodically. I was at Iowa State in 2014 when we attended. There's an area just west of the visitor center with an environment very similar to the moon. Teams tele-operated the robots from ~30 miles away in Hilo, introducing a time lag in communications. It was a really incredible experience, and a lot of logistical planning to ship a robot, spare parts, and tool to Hawaii. Dremels are never the right tool for the job...but a lot of jobs can be done with a Dremel. Here's a video from Alabama at the same site in 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqWpglIwOr4
And probably treat cancers as they happen, accepting the risk of shorter lifespan.
> How are we going to deal with this?
I don't have an answer for the journey to Mars itself (and I'm also not sure if there's a consensus on how big a danger would such trip pose) - but you'll definitely want to keep the fuel between the passengers and the Sun. It would likely also be wise to pad the whole vehicle with some dense material - but to do that, you'd really want to have some sort of manufacturing capability in cislunar space, to avoid having to lift all that mass upwell.
As for bases on Moon and/or Mars, the best solution is probably to dig in - find a cave or make a tunnel, set up there, and develop underground. Ground is a very good radiation shield.
And crossing the Atlantic Ocean made you prone to dying of scurvy. People still did it.
Besides, how do the astronauts on the ISS deal with radiation? Is the ISS somehow better protected near earth than in deep space?
yes but it's incredibly complicated, radiation comes from multiple sources. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_Anomaly and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt
Once away from low Earth orbit the shielding on a spacecraft becomes very expensive in terms of size and weight, even when it is the lighter weight polyethylene material.
Is it too political? Well, you drew a tangent; I'm dragging it.
Political: West was indifferent to the plight/life of middle-east people for oil in 20/21st century. Needed little/no reasons to destabilise. When we can give up part of Earth for mining; I guess we'll think little about Moon when the time(profitable Moon mining tech) suits.
That said, naked eye cannot see any traces of human civilization at all on the face of the Earth from the Moon. Even city lights at night are too weak to be seen without a telescope.
So why should we be able to see traces of lunar industry when looking at the Moon from Earth one day?
--
How would you turn those rocks into gold?
Sure, me too. Also for here on earth.
> British engineers are fine-tuning a process that will be used to extract oxygen from lunar dust, leaving behind metal powders that could be 3D printed into cons
"Earlier this year, it was demonstrated to work well with simulated lunar regolith."
>"The electrochemical process takes place in a specially designed chamber - the ones used for research are about the size of a washing machine. Oxygen-containing material is submerged in molten salt, heated to 950 degrees Celsius. A current is then passed through it, which triggers the oxygen to be extracted and migrate across the liquid salt to collect at an electrode, leaving behind a mixture of metal powders."
PDS: Some posters have suggested that the electrification of molten salts to extract oxygen was a process known for a long time. Probably true, but this is the first I've heard of it (Disclaimer: I am not a Chemist or Chemical Engineer... in fact, I'm not even a real Scientist! <g>)
But, this is interesting!
In the case of water, electrolysis yields Oxygen and Hydrogen (is Hydrogen a metal? Some scientists say 'yes -- but only at a very high pressure'). In the case of a metal mixed with Oxygen; an oxide; apparently oxides have to be heated to very high temperatures and mixed with a salt (compare this to H2O being mixed with a salt prior to electrolysis, AFAIK, the salt is just there to make the H2O conductive to a voltage), and then electrolyzed and then you can extract the oxygen.
Now, I wonder if the process could be completed without a salt, because well, H2O can be electrolyzed without a salt -- you just get a whole lot less Hydrogen and Oxygen bubbles -- this is because not as much current is going through the water without the salt added.
That's because water without additives acts as a resistor.
The salt basically makes the solution into less of a resistor, and more of a conductor.
But let's say we wanted to accomplish this feat without adding the salt. How might we accomplish this?
Well, we could raise the voltage to compensate for the resistance that needs to be overcome.
Yes, this would mean lowering the current of the electrodes proportionally.
But, maybe we could use a trick, like the way a Xenon flash bulb is lit -- to make this thing happen.
Basically, in a Xenon flash bulb, a very quickly occurring high-voltage arc pulse first ionizes the Xenon gas, then a secondary much lower voltage (but much higher current) is continuously passed across the now-conductive ionized path blazed by the initial high voltage pulse.
So I wonder if something like that could work to extract oxygen from lunar regolith, without requiring (or requiring as much!) salt... or heck, heat even(!)... perhaps you could do something like get the oxygen out at lower temperatures...
It would just be a question of enough voltage to start the circuit -- and subsequently enough current to sustain it...
It's also equal-and-oppositely possible that all of the above is a complete and total crackpot theory...
...Take all of the above with the proverbial... "grain of salt"... <g>
(Pun intended... <g>)
Unless there is a detail that I'm missing, this is very similar to the process used to transform Aluminum oxide to metallic Aluminum on Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_proc...
The mix of molted salts is the liquid where you dissolve the Aluminum oxide. IIRC, you can theoretically try without the molted salt, but the temperature to melt the oxide is much higher, so it is not a practical method without the salt.
One difference is that this process to produce Aluminum you don't make Oxygen. You have big Carbon electrodes, and they get burned.
If you want to produce Oxygen, you probably can replace the Carbon electrode with a Platinum electrode. It would require more energy, and the bubbles will make the process even more complicated. (This should work in a laboratory. To make this safe an efficient at industrial scales, would require a few years of tweaking with the additives, shapes and temperatures. Amway, using Carbon is more efficient, and this variant is too expensive as a method to produce Oxygen for the Earth market.)
On a more serious note, is the high energy demands of this process a blocker at all? Or can we just assume that energy (solar) is abundant on the moon?
On serious note isn’t there some type of future plan to put nuclear reactors on the moon in this decade?
In general these processes are energy intensive because they involve temperatures high enough to melt rock. On the Earth that is difficult to achieve because you need to keep the furnace hot. On the Moon with its hard vacuum, a large chunk of rock moved onto insulating material doesn’t radiate much heat. So all you’d need, really, is a large parabolic mirror. The Sun is your power source.
Generally speaking, it’s a high risk, low reward mode.
If you can figure out how to avoid creating dust clouds on the moon, which is not a small if, solar concentrators could provide a lot of the heat for the process, reducing the power needs to the electrochemical part.
I wonder if arrays of mirrors (aimed at a heat engine or whatever they use to generate electricity from molten salt) would be cheaper to scale up there.
That seems like a great idea. Find a nice big crater in an area that gets a lot of sunlight and polish the walls of the crater into a parabolic mirror. Put your heat engine at the focus and collect tons of energy. The one drawback: how do you provide cooling? Heat engines are only efficient with a large temperature gradient (Carnot's theorem).
I'll take more dumb jokes over yet another diatribe on how Twitter's latest moderation policy changes will lead to mass graves and white genocide any day.
HN post topics are restricted, usually to technical stories or less controversial political topics. Comments tend to be precisely worded, and are often more pedantic. Because of how linking works (or rather doesn't), citations often use a particular format. Comedy is generally discouraged, though is accepted more if (like in Traster's top-level comment in this thread) there's also "legitimate" point attached. If that comment hadn't included the second paragraph, it would probably have been downvoted. All of that is part of the culture of HN, and I wouldn't necessarily call any of it toxic. Some of it follows directly from the site rules and moderation, some follows from the technical limitations of the site, and some just emerges from the sorts of people who happen to use the site.
The latter works pretty well on the moon because the day is pretty long at almost a month. If you get really creative the slow speed means it might be possible to build a giant tracked refinery that slowly circles the moon so it has continuous daylight.
I'd say solar panel output would be way more predictable than upon Earth as no chaotic weather systems at play, also larger unfiltered spectrum would mean panels could be tailor made to get higher efficiency than you get per m2 anywhere upon Earth with its atmosphere.
you can visualise it better here and whilst this is measuring upper atmosphere levels and not space - you get an idea: http://butane.chem.uiuc.edu/pshapley/GenChem2/A2/1.html
Engineers will tinker with the process by adjusting the electrical current and reagents to boost the amount of oxygen while trying to reduce the temperature needed to produce it. This will help bring down the energy required, which is already at a premium on the Moon.
Either way, what’s being described is a process to refine materials to be used in space, where currently sending similar materials from the is prohibitively expensive.
First step to an exo-earth settlement is going to be sending the biggest reactor that will fit on a rocket. Two of them, actually.[1]
Whether its digging, breathing, or making rocket-fuel pretty much everything is going to require, by earth standards, gobs of power. Last thing you'd want to do is operate in a power-starved or even power-adequate environment.
[1]Plus, to be fair, enough backup solar or RTG to keep people alive in case of reactor failure.
>Oxygen-containing material is submerged in molten salt, heated to 950 degrees Celsius. A current is then passed through it, which triggers the oxygen to be extracted and migrate across the liquid salt to collect at an electrode, leaving behind a mixture of metal powders.
And does not contain any mention of a magic catalyst.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/why-apollo-had...
It would be a comic turn of fate if we succeeded to turn the Moon into an oxygen-rich atmosphere, only to discover that we can’t land on it because every single rocket we sent on it burns upon landing.
That is something like ~7 the Oxygen density of normal air. Things burn hot and fast in that environment.
Low pressure (100-200 mbar) pure oxygen behaves similarly to low partial pressure atmosphere in inert diluate (i.e. air). It's not perfect -- things still burn faster without the diluent -- but it's not as dangerous as pure O2 at sea level pressure, nor is it like the high-pressure pure O2 environment in the Apollo 1 test.
Also, N2 (and especially Ar) aren't consumed to an appreciable degree. They can be recycled in an artificial life support system (as they are, and have been, for decades).