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British engineers develop process to turn moon dust into oxygen
- beervirus 6y agoYou have invented electrolysis.
- varjag 6y agoThis appears to be high temperature catalytic process that was developed. Not just a matter of plugging anode and cathode into regolith.
- fuoqi 6y agoThe article directly describes the electrolysis process: >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.
- beervirus 6y agoNo, this is not a catalytic process. It is just electrolysis.
- progman32 6y agoTo be fair, someone else invented electrolysis, they engineered it to work with regolith.
- DavidPeiffer 6y agoIf anyone is interested in other resources and information on this topic, here are a few links. NASA page on In-Situ Resource Utilization: https://www.nasa.gov/isru https://www.nasa.gov/isru NASA Swamp Works: https://technology-ksc.ndc.nasa.gov/featurestory/swampworks 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 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/technology/nasarmc.html 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqWpglIwOr4
- FlyMoreRockets 6y agoThanks for your most informative post. Elecrochemical oxygen extraction from lunar regolith has been a thing for decades, experiments have even flown on the Vomit Comit to demonstrate effectiveness in lunar gravity.
- Traster 6y agoThis is really stupid. They've managed to take stuff that's so difficult to find that you literally have to go to the freaking moon to get it, and turn it into something that is literally everywhere all over earth. What a bunch of idiots. 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?
- NullPrefix 6y agoWhat if, just hear me out, what if the end goal is to use this process one the moon where the input stuff is abundant and the output is going at premium rate?
- Invictus0 6y agoThe parent is obviously being sarcastic.
- satvikpendem 6y agoThat is not obvious from the parent comment at all.
- Traster 6y agoI hereby confirm I was being sarcastic, I really would like an answer to the second part though.
- fuoqi 6y agoIt's an old well-known proposal to electrolyze molten oxides, isn't it? There is even hope for wide industrial applications on Earth of such technology for coal-free metal production. Though I don't see a particular novelty here and it will be quite hard to pull-off on a moon base (after all, you have to work with high-temperatures and the process is quite power hungry), I am happy to see that work continues in this field.
- meowster 6y agoAt least on the moon you won't lose any heat due to convection with an atmosphere. I imagine radiation and conduction heat loses could be minimized.
- fuoqi 6y agoIn space you have a reverse problem: it's difficult to dissipate heat. It's a bit easier to do on moon surface than on an orbital station, but regolith has a limited thermal conductivity, which could be insufficient for an industrial process releasing a lot of waste heat. For obvious reasons we can't simply build wet cooling towers as we usually do on Earth.
- scotty79 6y agoMaybe it's the use of these specific molten salts to dissolve oxides rather than melt them?
- p1mrx 6y agoThis seems relatively unexciting; we've known that the moon has abundant oxygen for decades. The hard part is finding stuff (food, hydrogen, hydrocarbons, etc.) to burn with it.
- PaulHoule 6y agoYou can't breathe that oxygen, however, unless you blend it with 4 parts of nitrogen or something similarly more massive than the oxygen to slow down fires.
- koudelka 6y agoand also because high partial-pressure oxygen is quite toxic. :)
- nickff 6y agoApollo used pure oxygen, and skylab was 3/4 oxygen, 1/4 nitrogen. For context, this was done to simplify systems, and lower the pressure in both the spacesuits and spacecraft; low-pressure in the spacesuit is important because it makes the suit more flexible. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/why-apollo-had-a-flammable-pure-oxygen-environment https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/why-apollo-had...
- laurent92 6y agoDidn’t the full-oxygen Apollo 1 burn in a horrific accident while still on launchpad, and is the reason why doors can now open from the outside? One scratch and even iron burns in a 100% oxygen atmosphere. Honor to those 3 astronauts. https://youtu.be/M0YB5r4vzVo https://youtu.be/M0YB5r4vzVo 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.
- garmaine 6y agoThe problem was that it was full pressure, 1 atmosphere of pure oxygen. That was stupid and was only really done on that test, because it was a sea level mock-up. The actual spacecraft operated at just the normal oxygen partial pressure, but with no other trace gasses aside from exhaled CO2.
- Plasmoid 6y agoApollo 1 was particularly bad because they were attempting to simulate relative space pressure on the ground. So they pushed the internal pressure up to 20 psi of pure O2 (sea level is ~15 psi). That is something like ~7 the Oxygen density of normal air. Things burn hot and fast in that environment.
- fallingfrog 6y agoI mean if you have enough energy, you can do anything starting with just rocks. And, there is energy in space. It’s just expensive.
- amelius 6y ago> I mean if you have enough energy, you can do anything starting with just rocks. How would you turn those rocks into gold?
- andai 6y agoSmash them together, but like, really fast.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- FlyMoreRockets 6y agoHelps if you go to the asteroids instead of the moon. 16 Psyche has tons of the stuff just lying around.
- hutzlibu 6y agoOh with the sun, there is enough energy in space and in the moon (at daytime). You "just" have to focus and redirect it. And store it for the long nights.
- yalogin 6y agoThis is interesting. How much moon dust do we have that we are conducting these kind of experiments?
- vonwoodson 6y agoWe should enjoy the view we have of The Moon, before the whole thing becomes a damned strip mine.
- lota-putty 6y agoWhen species are getting extinct on Earth in our lifetime; many would be happy to give up the Moon for mining. 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.
- inglor_cz 6y agoYou can concentrate the most damaging industry on the far side. 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?
- peter_d_sherman 6y ago>"Lunar regolith, the thin layer of dusty rock that blankets the Moon, is not so different from the minerals found on Earth. By weight, it contains about 45 percent oxygen which is bound to metals such as iron and titanium, making it unavailable." >"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>)
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoIndustrial processes are just so power-hungry. We're a long way from mining, smelting etc in space. So many problems to solve, not the least of which is projecting power-generating equipment in the megawatt range into space.
- scotty79 6y agoI think we'll have to have nuclear power on the moon before we can ro anything properly industrial there.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoWe can start by sending nuclear reactors up there, like the ones NASA is developing for spaceflight[0]. Kilowatts electrical + thermal should be enough to do some basic, very small-scale industrial operations, and expand from there. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilopower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilopower
- cmarschner 6y agoI don‘t quite understand why we think humans can survive staying on moon bases or trips to Mars before the problem of cosmic radiation is solved. Going on a trip to Mars and back makes you prone to dying from cancer. Mars doesn‘t have a magnetic field that would shield inhabitants from being bombarded by high-energy particles. How are we going to deal with this?
- scotty79 6y agoI thought that on Mars and Moon we could just stay underground as much as possible. And shield ourselves with stuff we carry along the way. And probably treat cancers as they happen, accepting the risk of shorter lifespan.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThe problem will be solved in time, and in the meantime, we can solve other problems (like in-situ resource utilization, closed-loop habitation, etc.) in parallel. > 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.
- ginko 6y ago>Going on a trip to Mars and back makes you prone to dying from cancer And crossing the Atlantic Ocean made you prone to dying of scurvy. People still did it.
- RealityVoid 6y agoWe know how to shield from radiation, there is no mystery there, just put matter in btween the source and the passengers. It's not easy, but the physics are well understood. Besides, how do the astronauts on the ISS deal with radiation? Is the ISS somehow better protected near earth than in deep space?
- anonair 6y agoShit, this is what my HN app shows as the article preview: > 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