Resources – Luna 2076

More Moon Ice Than Ever Previously Imagined?

May 26, 2022

Shackleton Crater, of primary interest for its suspected water deposits.

Scientists with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) a the University of Colorado at Boulder think the Moon may be awash in far more water than scientists previously believed, reports Universe Today.

LASP researchers created computer models to recreate conditions early in the Moon’s history. They discovered that ancient lunar volcanoes spewed huge volumes of water vapor, which settled to the surface. In craters near the poles that are permanently exposed to the heat of the sun, the water froze froze. The study suggests that the water could measure dozens or even hundreds of feet thick in places.

“It’s possible that 5 or 10 meters below the surface, you have big sheets of ice,” says co-author Paul Hayne. “It’s a potential bounty for future moon explorers who will need water to drink and process into rocket fuel.”

The study builds on previous work that estimated 25,000 square miles of the lunar surface could be capable of trapping and hanging onto ice.

Do Small Magnetic Fields Protect Pockets of Lunar Ice?

April 11, 2022

This NASA Goddard map shows permanently shadowed craters near the Moon’s south pole. (Credit: LiveScience)

In 2018 scientists documented the first evidence of water ice on the Moon that was trapped in the bottom of craters at the north and south poles locked in perpetual shadow. Discovery of the ice created new questions. While the craters are protected from direct sunlight, they aren’t shielded from solar wind. The ionized particles from the Sun is highly erosive and, unlike the Earth, the Moon has no magnetic shield to protect it. By some peoples’ reckoning, the solar wind should have destroyed the ice long ago.

In research presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last month, University of Arizona scientists shared their map of magnetic anomalies, regions of the lunar surface with unusually strong magnetic fields, reports LiveScience.

These anomalies may serve as tiny magnetic shields.”These anomalies can deflect the solar wind,” Lon Hood, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, told Science. “We think they could be quite significant in shielding the permanently shadowed regions.” more “Do Small Magnetic Fields Protect Pockets of Lunar Ice?”

Chinese Focus on Helium-3 Resources

November 29, 2020

As China invests in its space program, scientists have identified helium-3 (He-3), an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, as a major subject of interest.

According to CGTN, a Chinese English-language news source, Chinese scientists say the Earth possesses roughly 30 kilograms (about 66 pounds) of the helium isotope. Deposited by solar wind, the substance is abundant on the Moon’s surface — about a million metric tons. That’s enough to power the Earth for a thousand years.

Extracting He-3 from the lunar regolith does pose a challenge. The material would have to be heated to about 600 degrees Celsius before being extracted, packaged and transported back to Earth.

China’s Chang’e-5 lunar space mission, a 23-day operation launched Monday, aims to bring back regolith from the Moon.

“There seems to be another wave of interest of going to the moon, both by the United States and China and there may be other countries as well,” said University of Wisconsin engineering professor Gerald Kulcinski. “And most of these programs have, as part of their goal, harvesting helium-3 for terrestrial use.”

Resource Scarcity on Moon Could Spur Conflict

November 23, 2020

Resource scarcity on the Moon could lead to overcrowding, resource depletion and international tension, warns an international team of scientists in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

“A lot of people think of space as a place of peace and harmony between nations. The problem is there’s no law to regulate who gets to use the resources, and there are a significant number of space agencies and others in the private sector that aim to land on the moon within the next five years,” says Martin Elvis, astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the lead author on the paper.

“We looked at all the maps of the Moon we could find and found that not very many places had resources of interest, and those that did were very small. That creates a lot of room for conflict over certain resources.”

Water will be needed for survival on the Moon. Iron will be required to build anything. The Helium-3 isotope will be the fuel for nuclear fusion. Even solar power is subject to scarcity; only a few spots at the lunar poles are exposed to 24-hour-per-day sunlight. The resources are spread unevenly across the satellite.

“The biggest problem is that everyone is targeting the same sites and resources: states, private companies, everyone. But they are limited sites and resources,” says Tony Milligan, a co-author and senior researcher with the Cosmological Visionaries project at King’s College London. “We don’t have a second moon to move on to. This is all we have to work with.” more “Resource Scarcity on Moon Could Spur Conflict”

Metalysis Announces Breakthrough in Extracting Oxygen from Lunar Rock

November 10, 2020

Metalysis, a Sheffield, England-based manufacturer of metal and alloy powders, has won a European Space Agency contract to develop a process to turn Moon dust into oxygen along with aluminum, iron and other metal powders that lunar colonists can use for construction, reports The Guardian.

Oxygen makes up about 45% of the molecular weight of rocks brought back from the Moon. The rest is mainly iron, aluminum and silicon. Earlier this year scientists at Metalysis and the University of Glasgow announced they could extract 95% of the oxygen from simulated lunar soil, leaving useful metal alloy powders behind.

The ESA contract will fund Metalysis for nine months to perfect an electrochemical process that extracts oxygen from dust and rocks by sending an electrical current through the material. The process is already in use in Earth, but oxygen is an unneeded byproduct. The story is quite different on the Moon, where oxygen is a major constituent of two extremely scarce commodities: breathable air and rocket fuel.

“Oxygen is useful not only for astronauts to breathe, but also as an oxidiser in rocket propulsion systems,” said Mark Symes, with the University of Glasgow. “There is no free oxygen on the moon, so astronauts would have to take all their own oxygen with them to the moon, for life support and to enable their return journey, and this adds considerably to the weight and hence expense of rocket launches bound for the moon.”

Bacon’s bottom line: The industrial-scale manufacture of oxygen and metals on the Moon will transform lunar economics by creating a virtually unlimited supply of the critical element. While this breakthrough will facilitate travel between the Moon and back, it is not enough by itself to support large-scale colonization there. Pure oxygen is poisonous to humans and must be diluted with other elements — most notably nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere — to be breathable. Also, oxygen requires a supply of hydrogen with which to interact to function as a rocket fuel. Scientists and engineers will need to identify abundant sources of these elements in order to free the Moon from the immense expense of lifting materials out of Earth’s gravity well.

Moon May Contain Billions of Tons of Buried Ice

October 26, 2020

Left: Cumulative ejecta deposited outside of craters. Right: Ejecta deposited inside these craters after they formed.

Scientists who have modeled 4 billion years of the Moon’s meteor-impact history have concluded that the Moon holds more water than previously believed. Much of it is buried, as much as 10 meters deep.

“We looked at the entire time history of ice deposition on the Moon,” said Keven Cannon, a planetary scientist at the Colorado School of Mines and lead author of the study in Geophysical Research Letters. “If the coldest regions have been stable and accumulating ice for billions of years, then some could have very substantial deposits, but they might be buried up to 10 meters deep or more.” more “Moon May Contain Billions of Tons of Buried Ice”

Molecular Water Found in Clavius Crater

October 26, 2020

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has detected evidence of molecular water in the regolith of Clavius Crater, a large crater visible from Earth in the Moon’s southern hemisphere. The airborne SOFIA observatory, a partnership between NASA and the German Aerospace Center, flies in a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft above the atmospheric water that blocks ground observation.

Satellites have had detected “hydrates” in the lunar regolith but could not distinguish between OH (hydroxyl) and H20 (molecular water). SOFIA was able to measure the precise being vibration of the H-O-H molecular bond at 6.1 µm in the infrared.

SOFIA targeted high lunar latitudes near the South Pole where low temperatures could allow migrating water to transiently remain on the surface and high hydroxyl abundances could create and trap water when impacted by small meteorites. Although Clavius has a relatively high concentration of water by lunar standards, says NASA, it is roughly one-hundredth of the water found in the Sahara desert. more “Molecular Water Found in Clavius Crater”

NASA Seeks Small Business Solutions for Water Mining on Moon

July 14, 2020

This NASA image shows distribution of surface ice at the Moon’s north south and north poles.

Looking for creative approaches to tap lunar resources to meet the needs of astronauts on the Moon, NASA has reached out to small businesses and nonprofit research institutes for ideas. Working through its small business programs, the agency has winnowed down 409 proposals for Phase 1 development.

Consistent with NASA’s goals for Project Artemis, the proposals are focused on extraction and processing of water ice from lunar regolith to create oxygen, drinking water and rocket fuel, according to Universe Today.

Projects to receive funding under the Small Business Innovation Research Program include: more “NASA Seeks Small Business Solutions for Water Mining on Moon”

Radar Finds More Metals on Moon than Previously Thought

July 1, 2020

Using the Miniature Radio Frequency (Mini-RF) instrument on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, mission members have found evidence that the Moon’s subsurface may be richer in minerals like iron and titanium than previously thought.

The Moon is widely believed to have originated from the collision of a Mars-sized proto-plant with the young Earth. In theory, the Moon’s bulk chemical composition should resemble that of the Earth. But many parts of the surface, such as the lunar highlands, appear to be metal-poor.

The mini-RF, explains NASA, allowed scientists to measure an electrical property known as the dielectric constant within lunar soil piled on crater floors in the Moon’s northern hemisphere.

The research team noticed that the property increased with crater size — up to a certain point. When the craters reached three to twelve miles in diameter, the property remained constant. No one expected to find the relationship. Says the NASA article:

Discovery of this pattern opened a door to a new possibility. Because meteors that form larger craters also dig deeper into the Moon’s subsurface, the team reasoned that the increasing dielectric constant of the dust in larger craters could be the result of meteors excavating iron and titanium oxides that lie below the surface. Dielectric properties are directly linked to the concentration of these metal minerals.

If their hypothesis were true, it would mean only the first few hundred meters of the Moon’s surface is scant in iron and titanium oxides, but below the surface, there’s a steady increase to a rich and unexpected bonanza. …

The larger craters, with their increased dielectric material, were also richer in metals, suggesting that more iron and titanium oxides had been excavated from the depths of 0.3 to 1 mile (0.5 to 2 kilometers) than from the upper 0.1 to 0.3 miles (0.2 to 0.5 kilometers) of the lunar subsurface.

How to Extract Ice on the Moon

May 18, 2020

Lunar ice water extractor. Concept art credit: George Sowers and MIT Technology Review

Water is essential to space exploration and colonization. Now that it has been demonstrated that billions of gallons of ice and molecular water are found on the Moon, the challenge is to figure out how to extract it.

In MIT Technology Review, space reporter Neel V. Patel lists the obstacles. Super-cold temperatures and radiation could endanger humans and degrade equipment. Lunar dust sticks to everything, wrecking machinery and posing safety issues to workers in spacesuits. And, of course, astronaut miners would have to be housed and supported on the Moon.

Lunar water comes in the form of tiny icy grained mixed with the soil, mostly in permanently shaded regions of craters in temperatures of 40 K (-233.15 °C). To be useful as a rocket fuel the material, only 5.6% water by weight, would require aggressive processing to rid contaminants.

One proposed method would be to build large towers with concave mirrors on the top that could reflect sunlight into the shadowed regions of lunar craters trapping the water. The energy would heat the lunar soil enough to get the ice to sublimate into vapor. A tent (transparent so the light could get through) would capture the vapor, which could be moved into units where it would freeze back into ice, and then purified at a separate location. Ultimately, the water would be separated into oxygen and hydrogen by electrolysis, and then liquified to the constituents used as rocket propellant.

Although humans have demonstrated the ability to operate rovers and landers that can withstand conditions on the Moon, no one knows if industrial infrastructure would hold up. Writes Patel: “It’s not easy to just wake a piece of technology from a 40 K slumber.” more “How to Extract Ice on the Moon”

Category: Resources