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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.""
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.
the problem isnt extracting the oxygen, it's already possible. the problem is extracting it with limited time and power.
Actually, the challenge is for 5kg (mass) of O2, but the units just got dumbed down for those who don't to metric. Extracting O2 from soil is done all the time on Earth, we just tend to treat the oxygen as an unnecessary byproduct while we keep the useful things (e.g. most metals); this will probbably not be "the biggest invention in human history"...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
Here's the link to the Space.com story published on the 19th.
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!
"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.
From wikipedia:
So the answer seems pretty clearly to be mass. It's even more clear if you read the actual NASA page about it, which gives it in kilograms, rather than blaming NASA for Wired's use of a marginally ambiguous unit.
Extracting O2 from soil is done all the time on Earth, we just tend to treat the oxygen as an unnecessary byproduct while we keep the useful things (e.g. most metals);
/ index.htm
And on this contest it sounds like the byproducts will be aluminium and silicon... and those will be discarded. Which is why I think the contest is poorly worded, and will lead to an inferior 'winning entry'.
Why throw away ultra pure silicon and aluminium just to get oxygen? With a slight increase in complexity you get a sweet refinery that can produce O2, Si and Al, as well as iron and titanium in much smaller quantities.
Sample rock break down, I figure this is *fairly* representative, but I just picked a random rock from the below link (by weight %):
SiO2 - 44.94
Al2O3 - 35.71
CaO - 20.57
Na2O - 0.384
MgO - 0.53
Fe - 0.2
Ti - 0.018
Here is a page on the moon rock samples:
http://www-curator.jsc.nasa.gov/curator/lunar/lsc
Each link is a PDF which contains, amoung other things, a breakdown of the mineral composition of the rock in question.
I would suggest that you look more at this article from New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7403
The big deal is that you are going to be given a lunar soil simulant (they say that getting the real stuff is just too expensive to do anything but a final proof test with) that comes from a volcanic ash deposit near Flagstaff, AZ. For a small fee a research team can obtain samples of this simulant for experimental purposes.
It must put out at least 5 kg of oxygen (assuming that the time to produce this is limited to a short period of time... 24 hours or less), and the whole device must weight less than 25 kg. I would also guess that space considerations are also something to worry about, but that the weight of the device is a bigger deal.
I guess the Wired news article says 11 kg in 8 hours.
In short, it is something that should fit in a foot locker that astronauts could pull out and set up once another lunar mission actually occurs.
This is a bigger deal than the tether challenge, and something that has some hard short-term practical applications in the space industry. Also, the $250,000 is something you can pay a research team to do more than hold a pizza party afterward with when you win. If you already have a minerology lab, this would be worth pulling a couple of interns/lab assistants over to wrap their energies around. And potentially some very nice contracts in the future if NASA gets off their behind and gets back to the moon.
35 USC 105
Note that 35 USC 102 is novel inventions, 103 is non-obvious inventions, 104 is foreign inventions, and 105 is inventions in outer space. It's no more than 2 statutes away from the critically misunderstood non-obvious inventions statute.
I apologize for sounding like I'm ranting on you. It's not you, it's just that it's really hard to have a positive, upbeat attitude when disseminating information about the US Patent system around Slashdot. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who IS informed about how the patent system actually works and I hope you'll understand.
Have a great weekend.