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One Small Breath For Man
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times reports on a new technique that may allow Oxygen to be wrung from the soil on the moon. This may pave the way for a moonbase, and allow permanent habitation on Earth's only natural satellite." From the article: "Lunar soil brought back to Earth is in short supply and highly prized, so Nasa researchers have been using matter with the same composition for its tests. The soil contains about 45 per cent oxygen by weight, but it is mostly 'trapped' in the form of silicon dioxide ... At the moment, all oxygen supplies would have to be brought from Earth, which is so expensive and energy-inefficient that it effectively rules out a permanent Moon base. "
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It's NASA . NASA is an acronym not a proper name. All letters in NASA must be upper case.
Only the English are inconsistent with their acronyms where they capitalize BBC but not NASA. So much for the cradle of their namesake language.
Oxygen don't grow on trees.
Morning Moon breath.
Task Mangler
I predict that if hydrogen can be extracted from regolith close to the surface, then a lot of that oxygen will be burnt down to make water. During the apollo missions oxygen had to be carried but more often than not water for cooling was the limiting factor for stays on the surface.
Its nice to see that people are working directly on this, even if it will be at least 15 years before anybody walks on the moon again.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I am no chemist, but I thought that with enough energy it is usually possible to break up compounds into their constituent elements. Is energy in short supply on the moon? Seems like solar and possibly nuclear energy from the moon's deuterium should be able to supply lots of energy. Am I completely retarded here? Probably...
A-Bomb
Silicone dioxide is fucking sand. That's right, plain old sand. Explain to me how to make oxygen out of it.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Can someone remind me of why it is so important to colonize the universe? Can't we just get our s... together here?
Picture it. Fights between "our reserves are finishing soon" versus "it's going to last for long".
Campaigns on the line of "Have children, they'll only take n cubic metres of soil per year".
New religions venerating resurrection via burial: "Oxygen you are and in oxygen you'll become".
Mr President Of The Moon declaring "We as a nation have an addiction to oxygen".
the real challenge to my mind sounds like a)keeping the machinery functioning for more than a few days and b) keeping the furnace's optics from collecting too much dust. I wonder how they plan to address the dust-related issues.
all in all, it sounds way cool. Best of luck to everyone involved.
Cause the article sure doesn't!
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
The article title made me think /. had finally opened its' much-awaited Corsetry section...
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
I read somewhere that the moon actually has a 10cm atmosphere made mostly of exhaust from when lunar landers took off. Surely some of this could be converted back into oxygen and continually recycled in a greenhouse (even if they need to GM the plants to use the gas). Everytime someone lands for supplies you've got a bit more gas which can be continually recycled.
while it's true that at the moment oxygen has to come from earth to the moon, the same is true for food. it would seem to me that the only viable solution to getting food and oxygen to a base on the moon, isn't to bring it from earth, nor is it to "mine" it from the moon, but rather to build a self sufficient environment, if you are talking about a permanent base on the moon, wouldn't it be prudent to build a base with it's own small eco-system? the right plants, it would seem, could provide both oxygen and food...
Oxygen isn't as hard to bring from Earth as you might think. Not only do you have to bring air to breath, you have to bring water, both for drinking and for cooling. Once a base is set up, some of that water can be broken down, releasing oxygen. Not only that, the food you carry there also contains oxygen. Part of the base will be a greenhouse, fertilized by waste products and converting CO2 into O2, plus part of the colonist's food supply. If there's too much organic waste, some of it can be incinerated, leaving (mostly) water and CO2, both of which the greenhouse can use. Yes, if we can't get much oxygen out of the regolith, we'll have to ship it up, but that's a one-time expense, not an ongoing one.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Too bad the Moon's gravity is a fraction of that of the Earth. It can't hold onto an atomsphere like ours. So, this plan had better account for the needs of a containment structure.
How do we get NY Times out of a British site?
Fact: Silicon dioxide is also known as silica.
:)
Fact: Inhaling crystalline silica dust can lead to silicosis or cancer.
I thought they were amusing facts. +1 Important please Mods.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
...so the news today is that sand contains silica...or that moonsand itself contains it...well, I'd better read the papers this morning.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I believe you should look up the chemical symbols for Silicone dioxide ;-)
well you dont, naysa does.
naysa?
the rocket people? perhaps you've heard of them?
C'mon. Leave the moon alone. Why do you want to go stay there if there is not a good motivation to do it? There is no signs of life, and no probability of it. You can squeeze oxygen from the sand, but that's about it. This is more a sci-fi wet dream than it is a practical solution.
Rather go to mars. Mars has potential. Which begs the question: Can you sqeeze oxygen from red sand?
We continue our inquiry at the wonderful world of Wikipedia. We learn that the Earth's atmosphere is only 21% oxygen, so our 9.765 mL of pure oxygen effectively becomes 46.5 mL of normal air. Our final reference tells us that the average human breath exchanges 450-500 mL of air.
Putting this all together, we get a notably unimpressive result. The "few hours" that it takes to bake oxygen out of moon sand creates only enough oxygen to support one-tenth of one ordinary resting breath for one average-sized adult male.
I really hope I'm off by an order of magnitude or four, but unless I'm terribly wrong (entirely possible), this technology has a long way to go. The final line of the article does give hope, however: "Alternative methods to extract oxygen from Moon soil are also under investigation, including melting the rocks into a liquid and freeing oxygen with an electric current." Obviously NASA realizes this plan still needs work. Hopefully
I only mod funny =D
I was looking at a Ramen ingrediants list while reading this, and I found out that the Soup Base has Silicon Dioxide in it... Does this mean Ramen is carcinogenic? And better yet.... Does this mean we can make Oxygen from Ramen if the need arises?
It's nice to know that Nasa have discovered new ways to spend the US $billions without researching new weapons :-D.
Which bird brain decided that an article from the Daily Mail (A UK newspaper) should be linked as an article from NYT?
Please Americans remember you don't own everything in the world.
The standard molar volume of most any gas is still 22.4 L/mol so 8g of Oxygen would be 5.6L of oxygen. Throwing in a ratio of 25% Oxygen, and we end up with over 20L of air.
Still not sure how you got that other figure, but perhaps it refers to the liquid form.
Contrary to what the article says, pure oxygen is toxic to the lungs, at least at standard pressures. It may be possible to reduce pressure, but I think the long-term effects on humans of breathing pure oxygen at a significantly reduced pressure are still unknown; I wouldn't want to subject myself to it.
Now we can all apply for a job at google's lunar base. This will speed up the building of google's G.C.H.E.E.S.E. Maybe they will make there spring 2007 deadline after all. http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html
we can test that.
My script don't crash! She crashes, you crashed her!
this is one of those techs i thoughed they allready had for a few decades ...
Does the moon have enough gravity to hold in an atmosphere, or would there have to be some collection apparatus linked to this device in order to be of any use?
It's not a soil. It's ground. Calling it soil implies idea that there are some living organisms there. which is incorrect.
root of all...
Till the moon is no more, that is.
Seriously, I know it's a lenghty process, but... sooner or later the Moon's mass will diminish significactly enough to have visible effects on Earth. Then what?
Fine, let's stripmine the moon for oxygen and small amounts of water using equipment transported from Earth at immense expense just to prove we can place a few gravity-maimed individuals on a Moon base or "colony" there.
The moon is a desert. It it a desert like no desert on the face of the Earth. We know that. Let's not engage in senseless activities just because we can. Let's not rape the public purse to satisfy bored scientists or political ego.
E Proelio Veritas.
I thought the elements that were virtually absent on the moon, while being essential for life, were hydrogen and carbon. That's the hard part. You have to bring it all from earth. The article is about oxygen which is in abundant supply. The oxygen part is interesting for the reason that it's simple enough to provide the first instance of actually mining the moon.
This is a dupe. I remember posting a similiar article about a year back, about a scientist in South Africa that figured out how to extract Oxygen from the Silicon Dioxide.
see that is pure briliance. now it will be much easier to put humans on the moon which will be great because it will advance the ultimate purpose of putting humans on the moon which is ...
... lets face it ... it is kind of embarassing.
... they even lifted a cool little jeep up there to do some moon offroading. What else is there?
hmmmm what the hell was the purpose of putting humans on the moon ??? Oh thats right there was this speech about four or five years ago, where Bush really wanted to be compared to Kenedy and so he started talking about putting people on the moon.
But then again I remember this other earlier speech where bush (again wanting to sound like kenedy) challenged Americans to give up 300 hours a year for community service. So which one of you people has done their community service this year? And no if you did it because you got a drunk driving violation that doesnt count.
Lets face it -- nobody did their community service. The few people that may have done some community service probably did not do it because of that speech, but for an entirely different reason. In fact everyone (including the biggest bush supporters) kind of forgot about that speech and the whole community service "challenge". So lets forget about the moon thing too. It's just as silly.
These speeches happened long ago and they served their purpose. I.e. everyone in the media talked about how similar bush is to Kenedy. And then there were these really cute arguments about whether he was more Kenedy like or more Churchill like. Or whether he was really the second Lincoln. Can we just forget about this whole period
If there is anything to do on the moon we can have some robots do it. That probably wont be a problem though because it is doubtful there is anything to do up there. In the Apolo missions they tried to do everything they could
From TFA: He added: 'You can breathe pure oxygen. There are some trace gases mixed with the oxygen we produced but they're in very small amounts. There is nothing dangerous.'
Doesn't pure oxygen markedly increase combustibility? I'm not a chemist, but I do remember reading that aluminium will burn almost as easily as wood in a pure oxygen environment. Which sounds dangerous enough, so how would a moon base obtain a whole heap of nitrogen to mix with the oxygen? Or since our bodies probably don't absorb that much nitrogen, is it not a huge problem because we'd only have to ship it up once?
If, with our processing, change the mass of the moon (increase it or decrease it), then this may become dangerous for the balance of moon's orbit. We must be very careful.
Inhabiting moon will not be the answer for an over-populated planet. But it is interesting for scientific purposes.
for anyone thinking that this oxygen can just be released and the moon will have an atmosphere think again, most if not all gases have an RMS speed greater than that of the moons escape velocity.
Quirks & Quarks interview with NASA guy
Set your phasers on "funky"!
So when all the ressources will be wasted on Earth, some rich people still have a hope to escape to the Moon. We could continue to waste more ressources, without fear :)
So nice...
Can we please have headlines which actually tell something of the story rather than try to be clever? Some of us use the rss feed.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
...to suck the resources out of the moon, much as they've done on the earth.
With thin air to show for it.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
...but to begin with, and to establish the base, a large parabolic reflector is a whole lot quicker and less finicky to set up than a hydroponic air-farm.
So build a dome. Haven't you ever watched any sci-fi? ;)
how long would it take for a small team of astronauts to smoke the whole moon?
From the samples we brought back forom the Moon there is a lot of Oxygen tied up in various Metal Oxides(SiO2,Al2O3,TiO2,& FeO). More info can be found at
Science is the Real TRUTH!
No Heinlein references yet? Slashdot crowd must be slacking...
In other news today, President Bush announced that he intends to put a man on the sun by 2020.
When questioned by reporters about the risk of astronauts being burned alive, he replied
"DUH..that's why we're gonna land them at night"
welcomes it's new oxygen-breathing overlords.
"I love his boyish charm, but I hate his childishness" - Leela
"From Oxygen does all life begin."
I have nothing to say.
Air on earth is ~78% nitrogen by volume (and ~75% by mass), whereas moon base air would be 100% oxygen. There seems to be a couple of problems with this:
1.) At 100% atmospheric oxygen, clothing and hair (and lots of other things I'd guess) become highly flammable, even explosive.
2.) People aren't designed to breathe pure oxygen for extended periods. While it's essential for life, it's also rather toxic - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen#Precautions
So, unless there's another element up there to dilute the oxygen down, you'd still need to take all the nitrogen you need with you.
That's the average atomic weight of Oxygen. We breathe O2, which has a molecular weight of 32. As another reply mentioned, a mole of any gas at STP is 22.4L. So 9g of oxygen is 9/32 * 22.4 L, or 6.2 L.
20% O2 is nice and breathable, so you could make 5x as much air by using "recyclable" nitrogen as filler. That would be over 30L of air from 9g of oxygen.
I am not a crackpot.
How is it that we get to go to the moon bradcasted live but I still doesn't have a moon-channel? A solar powered camera transmitting 24x7 from there... I'd pay to have that channel.
Something else a moon base will need a whole lot of. Or a *very* portable tunnel borer.
You'll have all this oxygen laying around, so just connect ;)
a spray nozzle to the tanks and voila!
What will NASA do with the silicon after it has liberated the oxygen....will they ship it back?
Or will there be a Silicon Valley on the Moon waiting for an Intel mining expedition.
Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. --Richard Feynman
I figure this oxygen would be stored inside a sealed moonbase. But I'm curious if the moon has enough gravity to hold an atmosphere?
Cheers.
Oxygen doesn't grow on trees.
RMS is that fast? When I saw him he seemed kinda overweight, or rather, on the heavy side of appropriate weight for a hacker.
Sweet! A new celestial body to ravage!
I hope they start drilling into the moon, and discover it's actually a big egg with a doomsday chicken inside. (I just know that someone has already made a movie based on this... But I haven't seen it.)
Frog blast the vent core.
Technically, you need to generate more oxygen than you are losing. Any moonbase will recycle the air through some system of plants. Once your extraction system generates more oxygen than is lost, you are ahead of the game. You let the system run and as excess builds up you expand the base. Expanding the extraction facilities shortens the time between base expansions.
I think the point I should've make clearer is the fact that the energy required to release this (relatively) miniscule amount of oxygen is astronomical (no pun intended). Even assuming that I'm wrong about my interpretation of the article and that a full one fifth of the 100g of the sample becomes oxygen, that we get a total of 20g of O2 or roughly 100L of breatheable air. In order to release this, we need to heat a quantity of 100g of SiO2 to 2500C for several hours. As the article stated, this requires the concentration of sunlight from a 12' wide dish onto a sample of just 100g. I'm not exactly sure how much energy that is (and I'm not about to try and calculate it), but it seems like an awful lot. Hopefully this technique scales incredibly well or the alternate methods of liquifying or electrocuting the sand have more promise. I realize this is fledgling technology were talking about, but it still looks like it has a long way to go.
I only mod funny =D
Just don't let my brother walk on the moon, his feet stink!
Also keep in mind that at most places on the moon, the lunar night is half a month. Most plants might not like that. I guess at the poles you can have more sunlight. You could supply the energy to supply light via a nuclear reactor/stored solar power, but then, why don't you just use that energy to also supply the oxygen from the regolith?
Using concentrated sunlight to extract oxygen from lunar material is an idea that goes back at least to the 70s.
Credo sim. - I think I am.
OK. If Oxygen makes up 45% of lunar soil by weight^h^h^h^h^h^hmass, then the silicon in the Si02 makes up 40% of the lunar soil by mass. So what makes up the other 15% of the soil?
If above arguments someone said they can only make a small amount of oxygen here on earth from solar rays with a similar mixuture of Lunar soil and that is not enough. Well something to keep in mind is how much hotter the light side of the moon is 253 Fahrenheit (123 Celsius). Making glass from raw silica requires 2,000 C. It 30 C where I am at now. The suns rays (due to lack of filtering are coming in at about 4 times the Earth Strength) -This last line is the sloppy guess work. So the same set up here on earth should produce 4 times that amount on the moon. Plus you get a funky little by-product called glass which can be made to make lenses.
One giant gasp for mankind.
~78% of the air we breath is nitrogen by volume, yet everyone seems to be fixated on squeezing oxygen out of rocks on the moon. Is this because nitrogen is easier to store and generate, or are people just overlooking it?
Your units are all wrong. 10 CM is a distance measurement, not a density or pressure measurement. It would only make sense if you meant that the atmosphere is 10 cm deep. That'd mean that at our atmospheric pressure, there wouldn't be enough on the whole moon to fill a soda bottle. Not very helpful.
Actually, there is a tenuous atmosphere on the moon. Hydrogen from the sun (solar wind)hits the moon, and a pressure wave builds up. It gets stripped away by solar radiation, but is constantly being reformed. The pressure is several trillion times less than our atmosphere, so in practice, it's still a hard vacuum. It might be feasable to collect it, but the amount you'd get would be so small it'd only be of interest for lab work. Over long times it might create collectable amounts in some regolith. That's how the He3 they like to project as a great resource got there. Colelcted from the solar wind over geologic time frames.
RMS speed? What does Stallman have to do with the speed of gases?
<ducks and runs for cover>
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Yesterday's technology allowed us to terraform the moon into at least Earth's public garbage dump.
Tomorrow's technology will allow us to terraform said garbage dump into a place habitable for rats, F-150's, and dobermans.
+1 for the sanitation commission!
+1 for the Rat King!
Build a dome!? Haven't you ever seen Goldfinger?
What?
Yes, I remember the fire. The problem was a high pressure of oxygen. Partial pressure of the gas is what is important. Sea level oxygen pressure is roughly 14/4 PSI. That's about 3 1/2 PSI. The capsule that day had about 15 PSI. that made fire about 3 times more likely.
To breathe, you need around 2 PSI minimum of oxygen. the rest of the air can be inert, like nitrogen, water vapor, or so forth. There is going to be some CO2, but you shouldn't have much, no more than say 1/4 PSI. you will have to have a way to remove that. In Apollo, they used a low cabin pressure with a high concentration of oxygen. The space suttle uses a more earthlike mix at 'normal' pressure. both will work to keep you kickin. For a long term moon base, we'd need to restock oxygen, and maybe other gasses we want to use. If we go the low pressure rout again, we'd only need oxygen, which is available on the moon. If we go the high pressure rout, we'd also need nitrogen, which has not been found on the moon. We'll also need water, which may be there in low amounts (hence the excitement about the poles). It's much cheaper to get it locally than it is to ship it. That's what this is all about.
Sorry for all the English units.
Of course we all know that you can't have a self sufficient Moonbase(tm) without mining helium for the coming fusion age. Otherwise your lunar newspapers will go on strike and who will tell the masses about the green moon monkeys?
OOOoooo!!! Make sure you put in some mystisim via an ancient pwerful religion. Something with action-at-a-distance too, that always brings in the audience.
It'll make millions!
Americans don't care about the moon. Whether it is a been there, done that attitude or a real understanding that much of what we can gain from the moon is a brief enrichment of a few select already-rich government contractors, I think the public wants manned space missions to Mars. Not sand burning on the moon, not space elevators made out of nano-tubes. I realize that there is a void of political clout in the industry, which make any progress towards Mars impossible but it seems somewhat self-inflicted.
So my question: why don't the industry wonks realize that 'projects' like this don't build support, they erode support?
Vrms = sqrt(3kT/m). For oxygen, at T=300K, I get less than 700 m/s. according to Google, escape velocity for the moon is about 2400 m/s.
What happens when they focus sunlight on the monolith?
No, I will not work for your startup