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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.""
It's been done, with a supercollider.. by bombarding lead atoms with the appropriate particles to knock out enough subatomic particles to bring the proton (and hence electron) count to 79, which is Au's atomic #.
There is a report (1972) in which Soviet physicists at a nuclear research facility near Lake Baikal in Siberia accidentally discovered a "reaction" for turning lead into gold when they found the lead shielding of an experimental reactor had changed to gold.
Note: any reaction tranmuting one element into another is by definition no longer chemistry, but nuclear physics.
(I'm a chemist).
I imagine that their scope is much smaller. They aren't trying to create an astosphere but rather just trying to get breatheable air whatever facility that they might be staying in. You're also correct, the moon cannot support an atmosphere.
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...
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
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
The sad thing about that is that the new gold is so fantastically radioactive. And when it stops being radioactive?
You guessed it.
It's back to being lead.
It's the real-life equivalent of fairy gold.
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oh lay off of NASA for that. NASA had subcontracted work to Lockheed-Martin. The mistake that cost tax-payers millions of dollars was made because firstly, interns make mistakes, and secondly, L-M didn't check their work before passing it back to NASA.
yes, NASA made the mistake of trusting the parameters and missed the error, but let's spread the blame evenly.
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
The new gold does not nessicarily have to be radioactive... The stable isotope of gold is Au 197 from lead.. it would appear the decay pattern leads to Au 194, an unstable isotope. However, if we start from mecury and force it to capture neutrons, the resulting decay chain can produce Au 197. Neutrons to attack the Hg would need at least ~9 MeV (within the ability of nuclear reactors, but the resulting gold would be contaminated w/ other radioisotopes)). I'm not sure if an experiment has been done in sufficient quantity to synthesize Au 197 from Hg.
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)
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.
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.
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.