The European Space Agency (ESA) has just picked an industrial team to construct the first
experimental payload to extract oxygen from our Moon's surface.
The consortium, which includes AVS, Metalysis, the Open University, and Redwire Space Europe,
is led by Thales Alenia Space, an aerospace manufacturer specializing in the space industry.
The manufacturing company signed a study contract with ESA on February 23 of this year worth
one million euros.
The idea of colonizing the Moon is not a question of "if" anymore.
Space agencies around the world are now focusing on "when" and "how" to do that.
While for some, establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon is a matter of destiny,
for others it's a matter of survival.
For today's people, the moon is what the New World was to Europeans 600 years ago.
They paid a number of visits there, but it took time to work up the courage to send people
there to stay.
Now, dreams of creating human settlements on the Moon are becoming reality faster than
most expect.
The main task for the winning team is to produce a small piece of equipment that will evaluate
the prospect of building larger lunar plants to extract propellant for spacecraft, breathable
air for astronauts, and metallic raw materials for equipment.
Our moon is not so barren, after all.
The fine lunar soil contains metals such as iron, aluminum, and titanium.
The surface material, known as regolith, also contains significant amounts of oxygen, as
well as frozen water at the poles, which could be put through electrolysis to provide hydrogen
and oxygen for rocket propellant.
Samples returned from the moon confirm that regolith is made up of 40-50% oxygen by weight,
its single most abundant element.
Oxygen is bound up chemically as oxides however, in the form of minerals or glass, so we won't
be able to use it immediately.
Scientists, using a prototype oxygen plant at the European Space Research and Technology
Center (Estec), have shown a promising extraction method.
The plant uses an electrolysis-based process to separate simulated regolith into metals
and oxygen.
Take a look at this image.
On the left side is a pile of simulated lunar soil, or regolith while on the right is the
same pile after essentially all the oxygen has been extracted from it, leaving a mixture
of metal alloys.
The new piece of tech will need to extract 50 to 100 grams of oxygen from lunar regolith
while delivering precision measurements of performance and gas concentrations.
ESA's goal is to remove 70% of disposable oxygen from the sample.
The interesting part is that it will have to do all this super-fast.
More accurately, within 10 days, because that's how long the solar-powered tech will be available.
David Binns, the systems engineer at ESA's Concurrent Design Facility, said the payload
needs to be compact, low-power, and able to fly on a range of potential lunar landers,
including ESA's own European Large Logistics Lander shortly referred to as EL3.
The EL3 is a versatile system designed to support a variety of missions.
It aims to provide cargo and logistics services for NASA-led lunar missions via Artemis and
support a European mission to study the Lunar South Pole with a robotic laboratory derived
from the designed sample fetch rover.
Extracting oxygen from lunar soil, along with useable metals, will definitely change the
game for lunar exploration.
This will help future explorers reach a level of self-sustainability so that they won't
have to count on long and expensive supply lines from Earth.