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It’s likely to take a long time for astronauts to land on Mars – he’s talking about NASA In the early 2030s, While ordered by Spaceon’s Elon Musk it will be earlier. But when they touch humans, they can find a MOXIE heir waiting for them. A crew member coming to Mars will probably have their device in a spaceship that makes oxygen for breathing, so the biggest problem to be solved is the propellant they will use to fly home. “If you want to burn fuel, you need oxygen to burn it,” Hecht says.
Hecht says a four-person crew would need about 1.5 tons of oxygen a year for life, but about 25 tons to fuel 7 tons of rocket fuel. The easiest way would be to send an automatic system six months before the crew arrived, waiting for the astronauts to have some oxygen. It also means they will have to carry less equipment off the ground. “It wouldn’t be worth the complexity to bring tons of equipment to the propeller to make 25 tons of oxygen,” Hecht says.
Some of these calculations are being studied for a prospective lunar mission that could occur much earlier than the trip to Mars. NASA and ESA teams are working to heat the lunar soil, known as regolith, to extract oxygen. In fact, he is a regular 45 percent oxygen by weight, related to metallic elements such as silicon, aluminum, calcium, magnesium, iron and titanium, according to Beth Lomax, PhD student at the University of Glasgow and researcher at the European Research and Technology Center at ESA in Noordwijk. The Netherlands.
Lomax and Alexandre Meurisse, colleagues at the research center, have been developing a device for heating regolith in a vessel containing molten salt to extract oxygen. As in the MOXIE project, they use an electric current to separate oxygen from other elements. Unlike MOXIE, they have a by-product: metallic elements that can be useful as building materials for the lunar base. (In fact, he is considering combining another ESA team astronaut piss with regolito to form a reusable geopolymer material similar to flying ash.)
Lomax says it makes sense to figure out how to exploit what is already on the surface of the moon, rather than hand it off the Earth. “As long-term space exploration and habitation seem to be becoming more of a reality, the use of resources will be necessary,” Lomax says. “It’s not feasible for us to bring every kilogram of material we need from Earth in a consistent way. We have this huge gravitational well, and the amount of energy needed to carry that material into space is very large.”
Using a container of molten salt, Lomax and Meurisse are lowering the temperature required to extract oxygen from the lunar soil and falling from 1,600 degrees Celsius (2,912 Fahrenheit) to 600 C (1,112 F). That temperature could be reached concentrating solar energy, A method already proven in solar power plants in the southwestern United States.
At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, researchers are working on how to remove metal byproducts that accumulate in a reactor vessel that is regulated during electrolysis. This is important because the molten material is highly corrosive, and metals and oxygen must be extracted in some way, according to NASA researcher Kevin Grossman. The goal is to melt the regulator without touching the sides of the container. “If you want to take a bowl of regolito and melt it the size of a golf ball in the middle of it, how do you get there?” Grossman asks.
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