Experts Figure Out How to Turn Moon Rock into Oxygen

In a groundbreaking new find, experts at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, have announced having managed to find a way to convert Moon rocks directly into oxygen, a find that could have significant implications on future expeditions to the Earth's natural satellite. For would-be colonists, every pound they will be able to take with them in their voyage will count, and so occupying a lot of space with oxygen reserves was not really an option, and constituted a big obstacle. Now, the new method will be able to at least ensure the self-sufficiency of future lunar bases in terms of the vital chemical.

According to some estimates, it could cost about $100 million per tonne of oxygen to deliver the stuff to the Moon, a sum that is unfeasible when considering that a Moon settlement would have fairly limited resources and a lot of visitors. This line of reasoning made the UK scientists engage in an effort to discover cheaper ways of keeping space explorers alive, and they thought it best to turn to the Moon itself for help. Team leader and UC material chemist Derek Fray, working together with colleagues, managed to successfully modify an electrochemical process that the team invented back in 2000, for extracting metals and alloys from metal oxides.

In their new experiments, the British scientists used an engineered type of rock known as JSC-1, which was developed by experts at NASA. They subjected it to their process, which involves using an anode, cathode and electrical current for the extraction of oxygen. The team estimates that three of their new reactors, each about one meter high, would be enough to extract about one tonne of oxygen on the Moon per year. The positive results continued – Fray revealed that, in the three tonnes or rocks that are required for each tonne of oxygen, nearly a 100 percent oxygen recovery rate was recorded.

NASA has been supporting research in finding ways of extracting oxygen directly from Moon rocks for quite some time now, but its award, originally $250,000, now $1 million, was never claimed. The agency's demands were straightforward and simple – contestants for the prize had to devise a method of extracting five kilograms of oxygen in eight hours from some simulated Moon rock. This is the minimum level that is needed in order to sustain a small human expedition on the surface of the satellite. NASA also makes its own efforts at cracking the technology, via its In Situ Resource Utilization program, which is currently ongoing, Nature News informs.