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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.""
Isn't that a bit of a weak prize? This would seem to be a cornerstone achievement in the progression of off planet science.
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?
Maiden offers first child for someone to spin gold from straw.
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
I guess it's back to square one for me.
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.
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...
We won't need to keep an atmosphere around the planet if people live in structures on the moon only.
Yes, the rest of the world uses kilograms.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Here's the link to the Space.com story published on the 19th.
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
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?
Yes it would be really cold in the nighttime and really hot in the day, but I am from Minnesota, kinda use to that.
Would you be able to handle the crushing loneliness, the bleak emptiness, and the lack of human culture? Oh wait, right, Minnesota, you probably would...
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?
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!
Uh, isn't your post sorta like saying we should never try space travel because we'd have to fill the universe with breathable oxygen?
"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.
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
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?
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)
...don't spend it on the moon. There your prize is only worth about $41.6k dollars.
Really? I know how to manufacture a quiche, but I don't think I could get just the eggs back out of it.
Please, for the love of God, no more car analogies.
The question is not how to get it out, but how to get it out quickly, efficiently and without external chemicals or supplies. As someone already said above, it's not interesting to extract 5 kg of anything by using up 10 kg of something else that is equally unavailable on the Moon.
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.
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
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.