Slashdot Mirror
NASA Offers Reward for Extracting O2 from Moondust
DoubleWhopper writes "Break out the duct tape and paper clips. NASA has announced a $250,000 reward to the "first team of scientists to invent a way to extract breathable oxygen from lunar soil". Wired reports, "Inventors who attempt the Moon Regolith Oxygen (or MoonROx) challenge will have just eight hours to extract at least 11 pounds of breathable oxygen from a simulated form of lunar soil.""
Isn't that a bit of a weak prize? This would seem to be a cornerstone achievement in the progression of off planet science.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dear NASA
I have a small team, and I do mean small team that is quite good at extracting things from the ground. Does it matter if they are not scientists?
Yours etc.
Snow White
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I'll give 200 Million Dollars for the first team who can complete my contest.
"Turn Lead Into Gold"
(Winning contestants may see light of day again... jk... not really)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
So, is that 11 pounds on earth, or on the moon? And if you can do this, why accept just $250,000 for what could be the biggest invention in human history?
Earlier today we heard about space tourism and this looks a lot like the beginnings of investigating the construction of a moon base. I don't know what this means really, but I am enjoying the slow march towards science fiction.
Maiden offers first child for someone to spin gold from straw.
its a lot more than just o2 that we need. The planet in question needs to be able to keep hold of an atmosphere. This means it needs a magnetic field like we do to divert solar winds, so they dont strip all of our air away. Does the moon even have a magnetic field any bit like ours? I dont know for sure, but I bet it does not.
Bang! Zoom! To the moon, Alice, to the moon!
Don't worry...
I've already applied for all the necessary patents.
It really doesn't matter who wins the contest... I'm already the winner.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Can we just menace the gas company execs with a big lump of moon rock?
"Give me all your gas or else!"
liqbase
I guess it's back to square one for me.
Do I have to sign up now to get an apartment on the moon, or should I wait. Think about the back-pod telescope views you would have from your patio. Yes it would be really cold in the nighttime and really hot in the day, but I am from Minnesota, kinda use to that.
If you got enough oxygen maybe Google could build the Coprinicus center up there!
But in the meantime it is really cool that this science work is going on. I just wish I could be one of the unnamed grad students working on the project, although I suppose first I would have to go back to school and be a grad student.
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
MoonROxxorz!
this seems pretty easy to do. according to a published paper (http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplore/Exploration /EXLibrary/DOCS/EIC050.HTML), JSC-1 contains several oxides including SiO2 and CaO.
Lb-mass or Lb-force? On earth it makes no difference, but we're talking moondust here. Those NASA guys and their units, you would think they would know better.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Assuming 1G and 1atm that's approximately 3750 litres of O2 (I think my calculations are correct. If they aren't I'm sure someone will be quick to point out); to me at least that sounds a lot for a tech demo, I'd think you'd need some heavy and therefore expensive equipment to produce that much oxygen, which could also make a fair dent in how much of the prize is taken home.
Any company funding this is probably going to want patents. Maybe that's NASA's plan: convince researchers who want to take the prize home themselves to try this with company funding, give the prize to the researchers, license the patent from the company at a cost lower than doing the work themselves, leave the company to make money from other commercial spacefaring entities. It could work...
RTFA. That's mass, not weight.
NASA gave the exact same problem to my undergraduate engineering class (and to many other years classes' too)... Except it was to be done on mars.
So, basically the idea is to extract water and electrolize it to get oxygen and hydrogen, which are both pretty useful things. It would take a big plant to make it at all workable.
<AIM-girl> Ewww, its all greasy and slimy!!!1!
Here's my 'simulated' oxygen.
Unfortunately, it only works when you get reallll close to your monitor.
I mean, you only need to create 11 pounds of oxygen. On the moon, that's less than 2 pounds.
Here's the link to the Space.com story published on the 19th.
One would think that a lucrative government contract would accompany the $250,000 prize.
Interestingly enough, this discrepency over IP juridiction was used by NASA to organise multi-region DVD players for the ISS.
See my journal, I write things there
Extracting 11 pounds of oxygen on Earth is a lot different from getting your setup to the Moon at a cost of thousands per pound, having it produce enough oxygen to support human life, making enough nitrogen/argon/(other inert gas) to mix with it to prevent fires and lung damage, setting up highly-efficient water- and biomass-recycling and food-production systems (remember that your operating cost goes up ridiculously with the amount you have to import), and doing it all when one mistake will kill everyone and waste half your work. Yeah, it'll be a while.
That someone will figure out how to actually do this and the boys at NASA will set off some sort of unstoppable chain reaction that turns the whole moon to oxygen resulting in a not so cool parralell to an accedent on Klingons moon, and with no Keanu Reeves in sight to miraculusly reverse the whole thing by pulling the plug on the sound generatior and releasing the white papers to be published on /.?
flinging poop since 1969
You mean, from the set of Capricorn One?
Aliens already figured it out. I saw this documentary where they activated this giant machine and that is how they made the Martian atmosphere breathable for humans. Why don't they just utilize that tech?
1. Get Bunch of moon rocks
2. Offer to trade moon rocks to a medical supply company for a tank full of oxygen
3. ???
4. Profit!
Give me a beachside cottage in Bali, two beautiful female promiscuous lab assistants, 500 bottles of tequila, and I WILL FIND THE ANSWER.
P.S. I am not a crank.
This is an easy one... You just take some moon dust into your hand and start squeezing. O2 will begin rising from the top, and H2O (this is an added bonus) will be dripping from the bottom. If it doesn't work, you're not squeezing hard enough!
Now what's this I hear about some reward?
I'm in. I just need some sample material to start with. NASA, are you supplying the raw materials?
Anyone see a list/limitation on materials that one may be supplied with?
Seriously, anything that can get one free and legal access to some C4..... who cares about winning at that point?
"WOW, did you see that moon rock blow!? The pieces are a quarter-inch into the plexiglass! Well, I guess that didn't work. But maybe we should try it again. Got to have more than one trial. Hey, can we get some more moon rock and C4 over here! Ours blew up! Did it on pupose? I resent that. Do you want to explain to your boss why you are standing in the way of scientific progress? No. Then get the explosives! Can't a guy blow up moon rock without being questioned anymore? Shees."
Vol~
Well, hell... anybody can do that..
As a matter of fact, every mushroom is edible.
Perhaps only once though.
Isn't that a bit of a weak prize?
No, not really... you see, they lock them in an airtight room with the moondust, some distilled water and acetic acid, and a Swiss Army knife.
The challenge is to rip those oxygen atoms from the silicon and calcium atoms. This is hard because they are tightly bound. Moreover, I doubt NASA would be interested in any process that consumes some other non-moon-available chemical (trading 5 lbs oxygen for 10 lbs of a reducing agent). I suspect that some sort of electrolysis might do the trick, but even that might be outside the power budget.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
seems like they know what they're doing, and that they have been working on it for a while!
I just have to make it slightly more efficient as I currently have to use 13 pounds of breathable oxygen as a catalyst.
Cheep, Cheep, Cheep.
--Mike--
Total Recall
"Inventors will have just eight hours to extract at least 11 pounds of breathable oxygen from a simulated form of lunar soil."
This should be rewritten to something along the lines of:
"To win, a team will have to develop a process that can extract at least 11 pounds of oxygen in an eight hour period" The deadline is June 1, 2008.
Insert witty sig here.
I'm sorry, but if you figure out a way to make the moon inhabitable, you better damn well score more than a quarter mill off the deal.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it? Generating light by means of electricity in a fashion that's repeatable by manufacturing techniques of the day and cheap enough for the common man was an incredible achievement and required significant technological advance for the time. We already have many industrial processes for extracting oxygen from oxides (often used for purifying oxidized metals, not recovering the oxygen itself). This prize is just for developing a system that packages those processes in a way that they can be used on the moon. Furthermore, it's not like NASA is asking the developer to warrant the stability of the process or any such thing, just come up with a viable method. Years of development will come afterward, and it might not even be with the prizewinner's system if the second runner up, six months later, comes up with a system that works better.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Kilograms are a unit of mass
I did this years ago in the basement. However, for some unfathomable reason, my oxygen was of the unbreathable kind.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Searching the nasa and related web sites, I was unable to find anything more specific than the article provides. All I found was an email list you can sign up for. When you subscribe, what you get is commands you can send to the server to fetch files. This is slow going, this is the second day, and all I've got back so far is a "list".
Anyway to sign up, you send an email with no subject and containing only the word "subscribe" to "majordomo@spinoza.public.hq.nasa.gov".
Here is the result of the list command I got back today.
>>>> lists
majordomo@spinoza.public.hq.nasa.gov serves the following lists:
Y6Y
berlin Readjustment and Recovery
bookshelf NASA Headquarters Library Bookshelf list
centennialchallenges centennialchallenges
code-m-0-supplement
code-m-1-supplement
code-m-2-supplement
code-m-3-supplement
code-m-4-supplement
code-m-7-supplement
code-m-supplement
geo-internationalcoop
haha
heads-up NASA Headquarters Heads-Up Mailing List
history NASA Headquarters History Mailing List
murep-announcements Subscription List for MUREP Announcements
nasa-adv-cncl-alert NASA Advisory Council Alert Mailing List
nasafirst NASA FIRST Robotics Project
press-release NASA Headquarters Press Release Mailing List
v49
I have no idea what those file names mean...and I'm not sure why there is one name 'haha'.
Don't worry...
I was really quite worried for a second there.
Seems like a stingy fucking reward for such a valuable and large leap in technology.
I offer anyone who can develop me a desktop cold-fusion reactor capable of powering my house a packet of peanuts!
Y'all might want to stand back out of the way of the approaching crowd of nuclear scientists flocking towards me!
Plants produce oxygen, but could they grow in moon-dust?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I've seen recently a plan to use small robots to turn moon dust into solar panels so electrical power should be plentiful. Use molecular dissociation in high energy plasma, such techniques could eventually lead to generalized device to break down any molecules into pure atmoic components. Here's a link to a paper on breaking O from SiO2. nice pure silicon in the offing too... the gold can be reused. http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0022-3727/34/11/316
Evaluation of the composition, the pressure, the thermodynamic properties and the monatomic spectral lines at fixed volume for a SiO2-Ag plasma in the temperature range 5000-25 000 K
W Bussière and P André
Laboratoire Arc Electrique et Plasmas Thermiques, Université Blaise Pascal-CNRS, Phys. Bât. 5, 24 Avenue des Landais, F 63177 Aubiere Cedex, France
Received 11 October 2000
Print publication: Issue 11 (7 June 2001)
Abstract. The pressure, the composition, the internal energy, the heat capacity and several monatomic spectral line intensities are calculated at constant volume for a plasma composed of SiO2 and Ag for several initial dens
ities and in the temperature range 5000-25 000 K at thermodynamic equilibrium. We show that with a small quantity of material in the plasma we obtain a high pressure. From the heat capacity and composition calculation, we deduce that the main reactions are the ionization of Ag, the dissociation of SiO2 to SiO with further dissociation and ionization of Si and O in the considered temperature range. Furthermore, with the monatomic spectral line calculation, we deduce that the oxygen spectral line has a behaviour rather different from those emitted by Ag and Si.
Hear that "whoosh" sound? Look up. Way up.
Using the patented George W Bush method, I'll find that 11 pounds of O2, even if I have to put it there myself!
Can I have my check now?
That's one way to get things done with a shoestring budget...
5 Kg mass O2 (desired)
156.25 moles O2
625 moles e- (assume electrolysis, starting oxidation state -2)
28800 seconds (8 hours to get it done)
3.76375E+26 no. electrons (you've got to xfer these)
6.24E+18 electrons/coulomb (def.)
60316506 coulombs
2094 total Amps (C/s)
-->262 amp-hr equivalent battery necessary to make 5 kg O2 in 8 hrs assuming perfect efficiency.
Will be interesting to see what contraints NASA set on the system design. One assumes that they would not reward solutions that are horribly inefficient. Afterall, you've got to send your gear to the moon and pay for the ride up there.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
It'll buy you a single ticket for a suborbital flight...
...don't spend it on the moon. There your prize is only worth about $41.6k dollars.
Why stop with -O2, go for the gold and extract -O3!
Holy run on sentence, batman!
We can't even finish the ISS (international space station) and now we trying for the moon? Someone should really stop me laughing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
since the Moon is closer to the Sun. ...what's that? Copernicus? Never met him.
Aside from seeing no necessity for change, your suggested change does not mention that the oxygen must be breathable nor that the oxygen is extracted from a simulated form of lunar soil.
I guess you are just trying to drum up hits for your free Mac mini.
Most of the non-oxygen would be persistent. You'd need it to start with, but once it got going you'd be fine. How many times does liquid Nitrogen expand when brought to room temperature? Might not take too much for a small contained environment.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
It might be a significant achievment, but there's no use for it at present.
If you knew a way to solve the problem, your best bet would be taking the $250K. Your other choice would be trying to sell your idea when people are in desperate need for it, which is unlikely to happen in your lifetime.
Obviously, there is no elemental carbon available on the moon, but the problem of extracting oxygen may be relatively simple if one is allowed to use carbon brought in carbothermic reduction of the lunar soil in an airtight solar furnace.
The science team of Weyland and Yutani promise to be the first to officially complete the Nasa MoonROx challenge!
Sounds like the first step of terraforming to me...or so I hope (;
Yuma, AZ...You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
...that the person that solves this problem is going to make much more than $250,000.
This must just be a way to get the ball rolling and make people start thinking about the problem. There is much more money to be made other than the NASA reward.
blah foo blah
The CO and CO2 products would be electrolysed in a separate step to yield C(s)(which could then be recycled back to the process), and breathable O2.
The carbon would be reacted with various metal oxides present in lunar soil. FeO, which is up to 5% of lunar soil, is the most promising source of oxygen, given that it can be reduced more effectively at lower temperatures than SiO2, and the astronauts would likely find the resulting Fe useful. The most cumbersome part is probably be the furnace itself, which would need to have a clear glass aperture (fused silica or quartz) to admit the concentrated solar radiation from parabolic mirrors or a heliostat field outside. The furnace would have to be completely pressure sealed and be able to withstand the extreme pressure differential between the near-vacuum outside and the hot gases within.
Direct thermal reduction of oxides within the solar furnace is also possible, but this is not a feasible solution due to the extreme temperatures required to reduce most oxides (>3000k). There is an additional problem separating oxgen from the gaseous metal products, which would tend to recombine with the oxygen upon cooling. There are further problems with cooling the furnace walls, which would have be constructed with tungsten carbide or some other refractory material that is difficult enough to build on earth, let alone the moon.
yeah, I'll bet they paid more to the "consultant" that they paid to write up the rules for this contest
very weak prize, they might as well have just said the reward is some title, like uber inventor of the known universe lol
I mean, come on...it's pretty obvious.
The soil on the Moon basically consists of minerals including aluminum, calcium, magnesium, oxygen, silicon, and titanium. So let's take the first one, aluminum.
It's atom has 13 protons right? So just take those 13 protons and split them up into 13 Hydrogen atoms. Then take those 13 hydrogen atoms and add them together to make 1 Oxygen atom...with 5 extra protons that can be put aside for furture oxygen building. So from just 1 aluminum atom you get 1.5 Oxygen atoms! Start cranking them out...and build some sort of machine assembly line that does this and you're on your way!
Where do I pick up my check?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Holding your breath would probably be an advisable strategy if you're in a rush to go there.
they have an unlimited supply of virtually atmosphere-unimpeded solar energy
Yes and no, unfortunately. Unless they put the installation where they get almost perpetual sun they are going to face a long night every lunar month. The plus side of the polar regions might be the availability of hydrogen, which might be in the form of water (easily separated in to O2 and H2) or in some other form. Hydrogen could be used to help reduce the lunar rock oxides to release the oxygen. Of course, perching a moonbase on the peak of the mountain might be tricky.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Yeah, but it's a "byproduct" prize. If you fight a low-mass way for purifying tightly bonded metal-oxides (aluminum oxide, titanium oxide, etc), as many research projects on Earth are working towards, you simply need to capture the oxygen.
One interesting thing I read about half a year ago, I recently was success in electrolysis directly on solid metal oxides instead of having to first melt them or dissolve them in another material (such as molten cryolite for aluminum refining). That might be a promising low-mass, low-gravity-tolerant way to refine metals and release oxygen.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
After the ansari xprize, nasa was ripped to start putting out similar rewards for achievements, and they are, however...
I think I read on a previous slashdot or fark article that nasa is not allowed to create greater than $250,000 prizes. Everytime they try a congressman from one of the stupid states writes in new legislation to stop them. But don't quote me on that, it was a long time ago that I read this.
Step 1: Switch to the metric system.
First, pour liquid oxygen onto the soil....
Really? I know how to manufacture a quiche, but I don't think I could get just the eggs back out of it.
I know how to pump Budweiser back into the horse it came from.
The lunar environment is so radically different there that it changes a lot of the design parameters. Structures weigh 1/6 as much there as they do here. Build a structure that is strong enough for Lunar gravity and it'll collapse here. You've got both a 250 degree F heat source and -250 degrees heatsink readily available on the Moon which makes for a nice heat engine but again, it only works on the Moon.
There are other significant differences so I'm curious whether NASA plans on testing the machines using Earth design rules or Moon design rules.
We need a new energy source here much more than we need air on the freakin moon.
But there isn't enough room to write it on this margin.
sigfault. core dumped.
Hello everyone, my name is Fred. But you can all call me "Uber Inventor of the Known Universe Lol".
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
I can tell someone either slept through physics or didn't read the NASA contest description. There, it's specified in kilograms (mass) rather than pounds (either force or mass). So whoever translated kilograms into pounds was probably using Earth pounds for their reference, not Moon pounds.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
SiO2: 0.53 * 44.94% = 23.8% .
Al2O3: 0.47 * 35.71% = 16.8%
CaO: 0.29 * 20.57% = 6.0%
Na2O: 0.26 * 0.384% = 0.1%
MgO: 0.40 * 0.53% = 0.2%
-----------
total = 46.9% oxygen by mass in that rock. I couldn't find how much moon dust would be available for processing. I wonder the percent yield necessary to win the contest . .
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Am I the only one who is unnerved by the thought of an invention that strip-mines The Moon to make oxygen? Depending on the amount of soil required to produce a pound of oxygen, the impact on the surface of our biggest satellite could be quite dire.
Maybe it's just me...
Just get a handful of lunar soil, sell it on eBay for a small fortune, and use the money to buy some scuba tanks.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Where'd you get simulated regolith?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
And I got O7!
That's why its the most popular post in the universe. Way ahead of the "Me too" post, and also a better funded response with more accurate information.
The people responsible for this post have been sacked. Please return to the post currently in progress.
Would lighting it on fire count as releasing the oxygen?
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
Is that one way or return?
here0 Guidelines.pdf
also, look familiar?
http://www.fsri.org/ISRU%20Design%20Competition%2
Have the people responsible for sacking the people responsible for the post been sacked yet?
I can just imagine seeing this on Reality TV, except that there is an extra rule where your team will be locked inside an airtight container with their equipment and the moon rock material while they frantically attempt to make breathable air.
Hi ho, hi ohhh....
You realize of course that 2096A for 8 hours 16768Ah not 262...
FRA: STFU GTFO
Yes a very weak prize. If a thousand people spend $10,000 each on research they will have spent 10 million, and that is on the cheap, it may take a lot more to really make a workable system. These space "prizes are an invitation to disaster. Like that Virgin Gimic - more a financed version of Death Trap incorporated than a feasable enterprise. Couldn't pay me enough to fly on that BOMB. Mysterystevenson
MYSTERY
A suitcase nuke.
:)
That will separate a hell of a lot more than 11 pounds of oxygen from the lunar regolith in a hell of a lot less than 8 hours.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
This is similar to when the US Navy in the late 20s/early 30s offered a prize to the company that could develop a diesel engine that would produce a certain number of horsepower while adhering to size and weight constraints so that it could be used for submarine engines. The manufacturers jumped at it not because of the sub contract (which was only good for several dozen engines) but because this engine would be perfect for making railroad locomotives. The winner of the competition could then build the cost of the factory to produce the engines into the government contract, and when the Navy had its sub engines the company could start cranking out locomotives at a higher profit (or undercut the competition) since the capital expenditures were already paid for.
The risk-reward ratio is way too low on this one. Basically, they're asking for a technological innovation on par with the light bulb
This is not grand innovation by any interpretation. This challenge, like the others, is about incrementally extending the state of the art. It is about practical, innovative application of technology, not about science.
Basically, the moon contains a great deal of oxygen, but the vast majority of it is found in molecules which bind the oxygen tightly. Some metallic oxides like iron oxide are fairly easy to crack. On the surface of the earth, iron oxide is abundant. On the moon, however, the most common oxides are of silicon, aluminum, calcium and titanium. These elements are bound very tightly to their oxygen, and require either great deals of energy and/or powerful chemical reagents (reducing agents) to liberate.
This explains why these elements were not isolated in pure form by chemists until the the first quarter of the 19th century, and in the case of aluminum, why it was far more valuable than gold until the dam at niagara falls produced sufficient cheap power to make production worth while.
Using Hydrogen as the reducing agent liberates some oxygen cheaply but leaves a great deal behind, but is easier to work with. More powerful agents such as fluorine, or sodium hydroxide are far more effective at reducing these oxides into oxygen and metal. However they are extremely corrosive and pose some tricky engineering challenges.
For instance, sodium hydroxide is great but requires the use of nickel electrode which are consumed by the reaction. Nickel is very rare on the lunar surface.
Chlorine, and even carbon based reactions are possible.
So the challenge is to explore the various engineering trade-offs. Weight, energy input, size, speed, and the amount of raw materials brought from earth and consumed by the process all need to be balanced.
$250 grand is surely a decent incentive for chemists and engineers to tinker with various designs.
That show was baaaaaad. Space: 1999!
Program Intellivision!
Does NASA know that the IRS and divorce attorneys already have projects regarding the extraction of blood from a stone or is this another case of the left hand not knowing what the right foot is doing?
BTW, the answer is in biomechanics/technorganics/nanotech so why worry now? I'm sure not too long from now and in semi-unrelated work, someoneone will create a method involving chemical dissolution of the rocks into a liquid that can be passed through microchannel crackers run efficiently on solar energy and the chemical mix reprocessed at the tail end of the closed system to be used over and over again.
$250K versus what this is truly worth, becoming the largest purveyor of oxygen generators for colonization in this system? Not like some companies haven't already forseen the vast riches in coming up with this stuff. We just haven't been given the cool write-up in SciAm yet.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I heard/read somewhere that someone said that 'everything south of the opening credits' is part of a Rekall trip. I think that opinion is viable because of how the film opens with Quaid and Melina strolling about on the Martian surface before Quaid has his accident and wakes up next to Lori in the following scene. Perhaps if the movie opened differently, this viewpoint wouldn't be viable. Any comments?
By the way, the movie is bloody, violent, and well made. described at the time of it's release by one person as 'a head film for action freaks'. It looks like the days of visceral analog filmaking like this are over in favor of the 'new brutalism' of scene after scene after scene of bland, lifeless CGI-enhanced filmmaking.
The power limit of 3kW over 8 hours (24Kwh) is just enough to produce 5kg of O2 by H20 electrolysis in a cell with typical efficiencies.
This shows that NASA has already anticipated the most obvious solution, which is to pass a stream of hydrogen through the regolith sample that has been thermally activated by solar flux.
The hydrogen will reduce iron oxides in the sample to produce Fe and H2O. The volatiles from the process(a mixture of gaseous H20 and H2) are cycled into the electrolysis cell and the water is electrolysed back to H2, which is recycled back into the process, and O2. The O2 is then filtered through a platinum membrane or some form of chemical filtration to produce breathable O2 with
I suspect that the winning system will be some well-engineered implementation of the above process.
The iron oxides (>5% of the sample) will be the O2 source used by most if not all solutions. Of all the oxides that are present in the sample in meaningful concentrations, they are easiest to reduce. Possible additional steps to improve efficiency: passing a magnet through the sample to separate out some of the iron oxides prior to thermal activation, or some form of density separation. The iron oxides should be relatively easy to separate, given that the JSC-1 regolith simulant is not solid rock but extremely fine-grained powder.
Another engineering challenge will be the H2/O2 filtration which will have to fast, simple and reliable. Platinum membranes are the obvious choice but chemical separation using Ag2O or other chemicals may be more economical and faster. Once the chemicals have reacted with O2 they can be thermally decomposed at moderate temperatures under 500k to give up their oxygen using readily available solar flux.
Given the power limits it seems impossible to produce a working solution that doesn't use solar flux. This leads to a number of other engineering challenges, including: a cooling system needed for some designs; a reliable solar concentrating system (using lightweight mylar-like mirrors that track the sun on 2 axes); a sealed, heat-resistant, lightweight reaction vessel with a minimal number of valves and moving parts; and a quartz aperture to admit the concentrated solar radiation.
All in all, an interesting challenge. $250k hardly seems like a sufficient reward if the challenge produces a successful working prototype!
Tell titan that it's amosphere is will drift away, hmm, titan's atmosphere is a hell of a lot thicker than ours and titan is only a little bit more massive than our moon. I think the moon could support at atmosphere quite nicely if it were artificially generated.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
You'd be surprised and the number of breath-able elements can be extracted using alligator clips and a water bong!!
didn't appollo use pure oxygen to save on weight?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Yes, and that was one of the causes of the Apollo 1 fire.