Space engineers now know how to make oxygen on the moon, and they’re working on perfecting the science so that astronauts can live off the lunar base more easily.Lunar soil, or regolith, is filled with valuable materials, like oxygen, as well as metals like iron, titanium, and lithium. And a team at Sierra Space, a private aerospace and space technologies company, is working on extracting it. Doing so, they say, will help astronauts on the moon to breathe, can help provide fuel for future missions, and is an important step for sustaining life on the moon, or other planets.
“We’ve tested everything we can on Earth now,” Brant White, a program manager at Sierra Space, told the BBC. “The next step is going to the moon.”
The team tested the technology during an experiment at NASA’s Johnson Space Center over the summer. The process involves a box-like machine that can take in soil, or, when on the moon, regolith, and turn it into a thick, sticky substance. Heating a layer of the substance to over 3,002F (1,650C) and adding reactants, allows oxygen-containing molecules to be released.In September, Sierra Space announced it had successfully completed the testing in a press release. “The Apollo program took us to the moon to study and learn. Artemis is taking us back to the moon, this time to stay,” Tom Vice, CEO of Sierra Space, said at the time.Vice continued, “Our company is focused on building the infrastructure necessary to enable continuous human presence on the lunar surface. This sustainable future begins with developing the core technology and systems that create oxygen in that environment, using local natural resources.”The team also says they can extract metals from the moon’s core that will help with building structures on the moon. While bringing oxygen and other materials from Earth is possible, White says that’s extraordinarily costly, and therefore the innovation is a meaningful one. “It could save billions of dollars from mission costs,” White said.
While scientists seem to have perfected the technology on Earth, bringing it to the moon will bring about certain challenges due to the lack of gravity. Dr. Paul Burke, a space physicist and aerospace engineer at Johns Hopkins University, who published a paper on the topic last year, told the BBC that the process of extraction, which involves bubbles of oxygen forming in the scorching hot regolith, will be different in a different atmosphere.“It is the consistency of, say, honey,” he explained. “It is very, very viscous. Those bubbles aren’t going to rise as fast – and may actually be delayed from detaching from the electrodes. However, Sierra Space says their technology was designed with low gravity in mind.Other scientists are hard at work on how to extract oxygen and other materials from the moon, too, like Palak Patel, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is training to become an astronaut herself. Patel came up with her own experimental molten regolith electrolysis system that does the same thing. She told the BBC it also addresses the gravity issue by using a “sonicator” which uses soundwaves to ensure the bubbles won’t get stuck. “We’re really looking at it from the standpoint of, ‘Let’s try to minimise the number of resupply missions’,” she said.
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