One of NASA’s primary goals is to establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface. Oxygen is a crucial building blocks for making that vision a reality. Oxygen is used for breathing nad can also be used as a propellant for transportation.
Scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston successfully extracted oxygen from simulated lunar soil. Lunar soil refers to the fine-grained material covering the Moon’s surface. This was the first time that this extraction has been done in a vacuum environment, paving the way for astronauts to one day extract and use resources in a lunar environment, called in-situ resource utilization.
NASA’s Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) team conducted the test in conditions similar to those found on the Moon by using a special spherical chamber with a 15-foot diameter called the Dirty Thermal Vacuum Chamber. The chamber is considered “dirty” because unclean samples can be tested inside.
The team used a high-powered laser to simulate heat from a solar energy concentrator and melted the lunar soil simulant within a carbothermal reactor developed for NASA by Sierra Space Corp., of Broomfield, Colorado. A carbothermal reactor is where the process of heating and extracting the oxygen takes place. Carbothermal reduction has been used for decades on Earth to produce items like solar panels and steel by producing carbon monoxide or dioxide using high temperatures.
“This technology has the potential to produce several times its own weight in oxygen per year on the lunar surface, which will enable a sustained human presence and lunar economy,” said Aaron Paz, NASA senior engineer and CaRD project manager at Johnson.
To apply this process to oxygen production on the Moon, a carbothermal reactor needs to be able to hold pressure to keep gases from escaping to space, while still allowing lunar material to travel in and out of the reaction zone. Operating the reactor in a vacuum environment for the CaRD test simulated the conditions at the lunar surface and increased the technical readiness level of the reactor to a six, which means the technology has a fully functional prototype or representational model and is ready to be tested in space.
NASA has already produced Oxygen on Mars.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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