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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...
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.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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.