Scientists extracted water and oxygen from moon dust from sunlight. Could it work on the moon surface?

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Floor -excavated soil could be used to produce oxygen and methane, which could be used by moon winners to breathe and to rock fuel.

This is the conclusion of a team of scientists from China who have found a one -step method to do all of this. However, whether it is economically profitable is ready for debate.

But the Chinese team believes that. “The biggest surprise for us was the tangible success of this integrated approach,” said team member Lu Wang, a chemist of the Chinese university of Hong Kong, in one opinion. “The one -stage integration of moon water extraction and photothermic carbon dioxide catalysis could improve the efficiency of energy use and reduce the costs and complexity of infrastructure development.”

They point out that studies have shown that the transport of supplies is transported by Earth for any future moon The basis would be expensive because a rocket is all the more difficult to start space. Studies have shown that it would cost 83,000 US dollars to transport only one gallon of water from the earth to the moon, and yet every astronaut would be expected to drink 4 gallons a day.

Fortunately, the moon has plenty of water, although it is not automatically recognizable. Caused by the effects of the moon CometPresent Asteroid and micrometeoroids and even through the SunwindWater lurks in Permanently crater shaded on the lunar stickscaught in minerals like Ilmenit.

The extraction of the water for drinking is relatively easy, and there are numerous technologies that describe how this can be done, including the heating of the regolith, by concentrating the sunlight on it. However, the Chinese team was able to go one step further.

“What is new here is the use of moon floor as a catalyst to crack carbon dioxide molecules and combine them with extracted water to produce methane,” said Philip Metzger, planetary physicist from the University of Central Florida. Metzger was not involved in the new research, but he is a co -founder of NASA Kennedy Space Center ‘des’ ” ” S”s ”Swamp works‘, a research laboratory for designing technologies for construction, manufacturing and mining for planetary (and moon) surfaces.

Methane would be more desirable than liquid hydrogen as a potential rocket fuel, since it is easier to remain stable, which requires fewer machines and less costs to keep the moon. Liquid methane is a strong rocket fuel when mixing with oxygen as an oxidizing agent. Many commercial companies like China’s Landspace are already Start of methane companies rockets.

The water -containing Ilmenit is also a useful catalyst for the reaction of the water with carbon dioxide for the production of oxygen and methane, and the Chinese team has developed a one -step process for this. First, heat the Regolith to 392 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) by focusing the sunlight to release the water inside. Then carbon dioxide such as what could be exhaled from astronauts is added to the mixture, causing the ilmenit to catalyze the reaction between the extracted water and the carbon dioxide. The researchers tested this process, which is known as a photothermal catalysis, in the laboratory using a simulan based on rehearsals of the mondregolith that has returned to earth from China Chang’e 5 Mission (the moon samples are much to be done in such experiments to destroy why a simulans are used instead).

While previous technologies could also achieve this, they needed more steps and more machines and used a catalyst that would have to be transported from the earth. The research team believes that their process is more efficient and cheaper than the alternatives.

However, butcher is not entirely confident that it will work. On the one hand, the Mondregolith is a competent thermal insulator, so heating a sample is not easy.

“The heat does not effectively spread into the ground effectively, and this significantly reduces the amount of water that can be generated in a certain time,” said Metzger. An option could be to “fall” the Regolith and turn it over repeatedly so that the heat is used more evenly. However, this slows down the extraction of water and increases the mechanical complexity of the process. In an environment in which moon dust flows into every corner and Winn and can be as large in the temperature fluctuations between day and day as 482 degrees Fahrenheit (250 Celsius), the risk of demolition only increases if more moving parts enter the equation.

“It may be feasible, but more maturation of the technology is necessary to show that it is actually competitive,” said Metzger.

There is also a problem with the use of carbon dioxide, something that is recognized by both the Chinese team and the butcher. In particular, there is a question mark about whether astronauts could produce enough carbon dioxide due to their normal exhaling. Butcher calculates that astronauts can only deliver a tenth of the required carbon dioxide. Alternatively, carbon dioxide could be switched from the earth, but this would rather defeat the purpose of the proposed technology, which was to develop much cost -effective means of maintaining water, oxygen and methane with resources that are largely available on the moon.

In the long term, however, it may be advantageous to send some materials from the earth. Metzger indicates a similar experiment that uses an exotic granular catalyst-nickel-on-pebble (Kieselguhr is a kind of sedimentary rock). Metzger suspects that a material that is specially designed as a catalyst such as nickel-on-silica would be more efficient than the mondregolith. Although it would be expensive to transport from the earth, the nickel-on-pebble guhr can be reused so that you only have to transport it to the moon once. In a cost-benefit analysis, it could be more efficient in the long run to do this instead.

Regardless of this, the research team has shown convincingly that the use of Mondregolith as a catalyst is used to produce fuel and waterwork. The next step is to show that the technology can be scaled in order to maintain a basis on the moon more efficiently than other techniques, and that it can work under moon conditions in which gravity is weaker, the temperature is too large extreme and intensive radiation from space.

“I think these are very interesting results and there can be additional applications to use moon floor as a photocatalyst,” said butcher. “More work is needed to show whether this concept can be economically competitive. I am skeptical, but all good ideas have your critics and you can never really know until someone does work.”

Related stories:

-Wasser mining on the moon can be easier than expected, India’s Chandrayaan-3-Lander finds

– Astronauts could mix with old satellites to make fuel

– Scientists find hydrogen in Apollo moon rocks, which indicates that astronaut moon water can harvest

There is certainly no immediate rush for the technology. Nasas Artemis III Mission, which is supposed to return to the surface of the moon in 2027 at the earliest, and Financing provided For Artemis IV and V in the future, we will not yet be able to build a permanent moon base.

However, Artemis missions are the perfect opportunity to beat up some of these technologies and will be very important to show whether we can really live on the moon or not.

Research was published on July 16 in the magazine Joules.