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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.""
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
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.
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).
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!
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!
The sad thing about that is that the new gold is so fantastically radioactive. And when it stops being radioactive?
Actually, the real downer is the fact that it costs more to make the gold then it is worth.
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.
...don't spend it on the moon. There your prize is only worth about $41.6k dollars.
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.