Future lunar explorers may be able to wring water from a stone. A prototype device has extracted water and oxygen from artificial moon dust efficiently and autonomously.
About half of the soil on the moon is made of silicon or iron oxides, which are rich in oxygen. at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy and her colleagues built and tested a device to extract that oxygen. Lavagna presented this work at a virtual meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress on 23 September.
The main section of the device is a furnace that reaches temperatures in excess of 1000掳C. Such high temperatures forced the lunar soil fed into the furnace to turn directly from a solid into a gas, to which the researchers added hydrogen and methane. These gases then chemically react, producing water from which oxygen can be extracted.
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鈥淭his is a quite well-known terrestrial application for metal extraction鈥� with the [gases] as a byproduct that now, here, are the main product we are focusing on,鈥� said Lavagna.
After the oxygen has been extracted, there are three main substances left over 鈥� hydrogen and methane, which can be fed back into the furnace, and a metal-rich dust that can either be left behind or processed further so the metals can be used in other ways.
The researchers tested several variations of the system, changing the temperature of the furnace, the ratio of ingredients in the mixture of moon rocks and gases fed into it, and the length of the various steps in the process. The most efficient version extracted 24 per cent of the oxygen in the artificial moon dust, which made up 11 per cent of the total mass of the dust sample.
It was able to do this with no human intervention and without clogging, so it could聽be set up and left alone by future explorers, said Lavagna. The process is also relatively simple, which will make it easy to scale up or down depending on the needs and limitations of a mission, she said.
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