Lunar Oxygen and Water Production Tech Tested 56
savuporo writes "NASA and its industry partners organized a two-week lunar in-situ resource utilization field test in Hawaii. The tested machines included a few different rovers and prototype plants for generating oxygen and water from lunar regolith.
Astrotoday has a picture gallery and a video report.
This follows on the heels of the recent ESA lunar robotics challenge event held on Tenerife, which tasked student teams to build a lunar robot that would be able to search for water ice in lunar polar craters."
"TWEEL" seems like a bad design (Score:5, Interesting)
Terraforming tag slightly misleading (Score:2, Interesting)
The two oxygen/water producing setups tested out here weren't exactly of the "let's scale up and terraform!! w00t!!!" type...
In fact, they are more likely to be refined and *reduced* in size, to be able to go to the moon sometime in the next 10-15 years, and put out enough gas (stored under compression, or liquified) to support a crew of 4-6 humans for several months.
Nothing about giant pressure domes or atmosphere-building just yet... this stuff is way more practical than that.
-L