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Inside a giant sphere, the engineers pored over their equipment. Before them stood a silvery metal contraption swathed in colourful wires – a box that they hope will one day make oxygen on the moon.
Once the team vacated the sphere, the experiment began. The box-like machine was now ingesting small quantities of a dusty regolith – a mixture of dust and sharp grit with a chemical composition mimicking real lunar soil.
Soon, that regolith was gloop. A layer of it heated to temperatures above 1,650C. And, with the addition of some reactants, oxygen-containing molecules began to bubble out.
Sierra Space’s experiment unfolded at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center this summer. It is far from the only such technology that researchers are working on, as they develop systems that could supply astronauts living on a future lunar base.
The moon’s gravity could be a real problem for some oxygen-extracting technologies unless engineers design for it, says Paul Burke at Johns Hopkins University.
In April, he and colleagues published a paper detailing the results of computer simulations that showed how a different oxygen-extracting process might be hindered by the moon’s relatively feeble gravitational pull.
There could be ways around this. One could be to vibrate the oxygen-making machine device, which might jiggle the bubbles free. And extra-smooth electrodes might make it easier for the oxygen bubbles to detach. Dr Burke and his colleagues are now working on ideas like this.
Stressing the value of oxygen for future lunar expeditions, Dr Burke estimates that, per day, an astronaut would require the amount of oxygen contained in roughly two or three kilograms of regolith, depending on that astronaut’s fitness and activity levels.
Palak Patel, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been working on ways to extract oxygen and metal from lunar dust. She and colleagues came up with an experimental molten regolith electrolysis system, for extracting oxygen and metal from the lunar soil.
“When designing their system, Ms Patel and her colleagues addressed the problem described by Dr Burke: that low gravity could impede the detachment of oxygen bubbles that form on electrodes. To counter this, they used a ‘sonicator’, which blasts the bubbles with sound waves in order to dislodge them.”
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