Oxygen – Luna 2076

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.

Simulated regolith before (left) and after oxygen extraction.

A team of European Space Agency (ESA) scientists think it has found a way to produce oxygen from lunar regolith, and it has opened a “prototype oxygen plant” inside a Dutch lab to refine the process.

“Being able to acquire oxygen from resources found on the Moon would obviously be hugely useful for future lunar settlers, both for breathing and in the local production of rocket fuel,” said Beth Lomax of the University of Glasgow in a statement.

Samples of moon dust returned from the lunar surface confirm that the material is made up of 40-45% oxygen by weight. The oxygen is bound up chemically in the form of minerals and glass oxides.

The European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), based in Noordwijk, Netherlands, uses a method called “molten salt electrolysis,” in which a simulated regolith is heated to 940 degrees Centigrade in a metal basket and molten calcium chloride salt acts as an electrolyte. Passing a current through the material extracts the oxygen and causes it to migrate to an anode where it can be collected.

As a byproduct, the process creates useful metal alloys. “The production process leaves behind a tangle of different metals,” says Alexandre Meurisse, ESA research fellow, “and this is another useful line of research, to see what are the most useful alloys that could be produced from them, and what kind of applications could they be put to.”

The precise combination of metals will vary depending on where on the Moon the regolith is coming from. There would be significant regional differences.

Says Tommaso Ghidini, head of ESA’s Structures, Mechanisms and Materials Division: “We’re shifting our engineering approach to a systematic use of lunar resources in-situ. We are working with our colleagues in the Human and Robotics Exploration Directorate, European industry and academia to provide top class scientific approaches and key enabling technologies like this one, towards a sustained human presence on the Moon and maybe one day Mars.” more “European Lab Develops Method to Extract Oxygen from Regolith”

Luna 2076

Category: Oxygen

Metalysis Announces Breakthrough in Extracting Oxygen from Lunar Rock

European Lab Develops Method to Extract Oxygen from Regolith