Obviously, the more resources that can be made on the moon, the better.
Sierra Space’s system requires some carbon to be added, although the firm says it can recycle most of it after each oxygen production cycle.
Together with his colleagues, Palak Patel, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came up with an experimental molten regolith electrolysis system, externalto extract oxygen and metal from the lunar soil.
“We’re really looking at it from the point of view of, ‘Let’s try to minimize the number of recovery missions,'” she says.
In developing their system, Ms. Patel and her colleagues addressed a problem described by Dr. Burke: that low gravity can prevent the oxygen bubbles that form on the electrodes from breaking off. To counter this, they used a “sounder” that blasts the bubbles with sound waves to dislodge them.
Ms Patel says that, for example, future lunar resource vehicles could get iron, titanium or lithium from the Regolith. These materials could help astronauts living on the moon make 3D-printed spare parts for their lunar base or replace components for damaged spacecraft.
The usefulness of lunar regolith does not stop there. Ms. Patel notes that in separate experiments, she melted simulated regolith into a hard, dark, glassy material.
She and his colleagues have worked out how to turn this substance into strong, hollow bricks that could be useful for building structures on the moon – a haunting black monolith, externaltell me Why not?
