Technology journalist
Inside the giant sphere, engineers surpassed their equipment. Before them stood a silver metal contraception full of colorful wires – a box that they hope to make oxygen on the moon one day.
Once the team left the sphere, the experiment began. The machine similar to the box is now swallowed by small amounts of dusty regolitan-mixture of dust and sharp bite with chemical compositions that imitate the right lunar soil.
Soon that regolith was the GLOOP. Its layer heated to temperature above 1,650C. And, by adding some reactants, the oxygen -containing molecules began to be thrown away.
“We have now tested everything we can on Earth,” says Brant White, head of the Sierra Space program, private companies. “The next step is to go to the moon.”
The Sierra Space experiment took place this summer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. It is far from the only technology on which researchers work, because they develop systems that could supply astronauts living in a future lunar basis.
The team will need oxygen to breathe, but also to make a rocket fuel for spacecraft that could be started from the moon and embark on destinations further at the end – including Mars.
Residents of the moon base could also require metal, and they could even collect this from dusty gray shards that litter the lunar surface.
Much depends on whether we can build reactors that can effectively draw such resources or not.
“That could save billions of dollars from the mission cost,” says Mr. White as she explains that the alternative – bringing a lot of oxygen and spare metal to the moon from Earth – would be strenuous and expensive.
Fortunately, the lunar regoliter is full of metal oxides. But while the science of oxygen from metal oxides, for example, is well understood on earth, the much harder it is. Not at least because of the conditions.
The huge spherical chamber hosted by Sierra Space tests in July and August this year caused a vacuum and also simulated lunar temperatures and pressure.
The company says he had to improve the way the machine works over time so that he could handle the extremely serrated, abrasive texture of Regolitan himself. “He gets everywhere, wearing all kinds of mechanisms,” says Mr. White.
And she, a key, thing you can’t test on Earth or even an orbit around our planet, is a lunar gravity – which is about one sixth country of Earth. Maybe by 2028, or later, Sierra Space can test its system on the moon, using real regolites in low gravity conditions.
The gravity of the moon could be a real problem for some technologies that extract oxygen, unless the engineers do not design, says Paul Burke of Johns Hopkins University.
In April he and colleagues Published the work Details of computer simulation results that have shown that a different process of oxygen pulling can be distracted by the moon’s relatively weak gravity withdrawal. The process that is explored here was the melted regolitic electrolysis, which includes the use of electricity for the division of lunar minerals containing oxygen, to directly extract oxygen.
The problem is that such technology functions by forming oxygen bubbles on the surface of the electrode deep within the molten regolitic itself. “It’s a consistency, say, honey. It’s very, very viscous,” says Dr. Burke.
“These bubbles will not rise so fast – and can actually be delayed from the electrodes separately.”
There could be ways around that. It could be vibrated with an oxygen making machine that could rush without bubbles.
And extremely smooth electrodes can facilitate the separation of oxygen bubbles. Dr Burke and his colleagues are now working on ideas like this.
Sierra Space technology, carbotermal process, is different. In their case, when the regolital bubbles that contain oxygen are formed, it works freely, not on the electrode surface. That means there’s less chance of getting stuck, says Mr. White.
Emphasizing the value of oxygen for future lunar expeditions, Dr. Burke estimates that the astronaut a day would be a necessary amount of oxygen contained in approximately two or three kilograms of regolites, depending on the fitness and level of astronaut activity.
However, systems for the lunar base support would probably recycle the oxygen that the astronauts inhaled. If this is the case, it would not be necessary to process so much Regolitan only that the residents of the month would remain alive.
The case of actual use for oxygen technologies, adds Dr. Burke, is provided in providing an oxidator for rocket fuel, which could enable the ambitious exploration of the universe.
Obviously the more resources it can do on the moon, the better.
The Sierra Space system requires the addition of some carbon, although the company says it can recycle most of it after each oxygen cycle.
Together with colleagues, Palak Patel, a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came with an experimental experimental experimental Molped Regolith Electrolisis Systemto extract oxygen and metal from lunar soil.
“We really look at it from the point of view:” Let’s try to reduce the number of missions to again, “she says.
When designing their system, Mrs. Patel and her colleagues solved a problem described by Dr. Burke: that low gravity can prevent the separation of oxygen bubbles formed on the electrodes. To counteract this, they used a “sonicator”, which explodes the bubbles with sound waves to remove them.
Mrs. Patel says that future resources drawing machines could draw, for example, iron, Titan or Lithium from Regolitan. These materials can help astronauts living in the lunar to make spare parts with 3D print for their moon base or replacement components for damaged spacecraft.
The usefulness of the lunar regolitic does not stop there. Mrs. Patel notes that in separate experiments she melted the simulated regolitan into a solid, dark, glass material.
She and colleagues worked out how to turn this substance into a strong, hollow brick, which could be useful for building buildings on the moon – Impose black monolithsay. Why not?
