It turns out that the Moon has plenty of oxygen, but it’s not that accessible. The Moon’s near-vacuum atmosphere doesn’t have enough oxygen to sustain human life. But as Southern Cross University soil researcher John Grant wrote in The Conversation, Moon’s top layer of rocky soil called regolith likely features enough oxygen to sustain 8 billion humans to survive for 100,000 years.
The only problem is that humans can’t breathe rocks. That’s where a new joint program comes into play. The new joint venture between the Australian Space Agency and NASA has been inked in October, and the deal suggests an Aussie rover will be sent to the Moon aboard NASA’s Artemis program to collect lunar rocks and “attempt to extract oxygen from lunar regolith,” NASA wrote in a press release.
Civilization-shifting potential
The results show potential to be civilization-shifting, as if lunar settlers can synthesize breathable air in situ, a long-term Moon base would be more feasible. The technology for extraction is called electrolysis and is “a pretty straightforward process,” Grant said.
“On Earth, this process is commonly used in manufacturing, such as to produce aluminum,” he wrote. “An electrical current is passed through a liquid form of aluminum oxide (commonly called alumina) via electrodes, to separate the aluminum from the oxygen.”
Hard to break elements apart
Oxygen makes for around 45 percent of lunar soil, Grant noted, but to extract it from other elements that make up the regolith’s composition, such as silicon, aluminum, and magnesium, the team will require a lot of energy and industrial equipment to break them down.
“To be sustainable,” the Southern Cross University soil scientist supposed, “it would need to be supported by solar energy or other energy sources available on the Moon.”
While the process of extracting oxygen on the lunar surface is challenging, Grant noted that Belgian startup Space Applications Services has announced its plans to send three reactors to the Moon to extract oxygen via electrolysis. It will be interesting to see how scientists pull this off on the lunar surface.
