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Space Science Technology

NASA Offers Reward for Extracting O2 from Moondust 276

Posted by timothy from the what-about-non-breathable-air dept.
DoubleWhopper writes "Break out the duct tape and paper clips. NASA has announced a $250,000 reward to the "first team of scientists to invent a way to extract breathable oxygen from lunar soil". Wired reports, "Inventors who attempt the Moon Regolith Oxygen (or MoonROx) challenge will have just eight hours to extract at least 11 pounds of breathable oxygen from a simulated form of lunar soil.""
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NASA Offers Reward for Extracting O2 from Moondust More

NASA Offers Reward for Extracting O2 from Moondust

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  • 250 grand?? For pulling breathable air from dirt? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Isn't that a bit of a weak prize? This would seem to be a cornerstone achievement in the progression of off planet science.

    • Re:250 grand?? For pulling breathable air from dir (Score:5, Funny)

      by Cylix ( 55374 ) * on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:29PM (#12600973) Homepage Journal
      Don't worry...

      I've already applied for all the necessary patents.

      It really doesn't matter who wins the contest... I'm already the winner.

      • Lunar Patent Office? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by hughk ( 248126 )
        Even the USPTO probably doesn't have jurisdiction out on the moon yet.

        Interestingly enough, this discrepency over IP juridiction was used by NASA to organise multi-region DVD players for the ISS.

        • Re:Lunar Patent Office? (Score:5, Informative)

          by back_pages ( 600753 ) <back_pagesNO@SPAMcox.net> on Saturday May 21, 2005 @10:47PM (#12602784) Journal
          This is like the 4,928th time I've said that Slashdot's average reader is rather uninformed about the US Patent system.

          35 USC 105 [uspto.gov]

          Note that 35 USC 102 is novel inventions, 103 is non-obvious inventions, 104 is foreign inventions, and 105 is inventions in outer space. It's no more than 2 statutes away from the critically misunderstood non-obvious inventions statute.

          I apologize for sounding like I'm ranting on you. It's not you, it's just that it's really hard to have a positive, upbeat attitude when disseminating information about the US Patent system around Slashdot. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who IS informed about how the patent system actually works and I hope you'll understand.

          Have a great weekend.

          • Re:Lunar Patent Office? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by bit01 ( 644603 )

            And this is like the zillionth time I've said that patent "experts" have completely missed the point about complaints about the US Patent system.

            Try to understand: The patent statutes could've been put together by the tooth fairy. It simply doesn't matter. Either what they say or where they came from.

            What's relevant are the results. And the results are TRASH, as even a cursory examination of recent software patents [uspto.gov] shows.

            The USPTO have been complicit in promoting these bogus statutes and are largely r

      • I mean, come on...it's pretty obvious.

        The soil on the Moon basically consists of minerals including aluminum, calcium, magnesium, oxygen, silicon, and titanium. So let's take the first one, aluminum.

        It's atom has 13 protons right? So just take those 13 protons and split them up into 13 Hydrogen atoms. Then take those 13 hydrogen atoms and add them together to make 1 Oxygen atom...with 5 extra protons that can be put aside for furture oxygen building. So from just 1 aluminum atom you get 1.5 Oxygen atoms!
    • Amen, brother. The risk-reward ratio is way too low on this one. Basically, they're asking for a technological innovation on par with the light bulb, and they want to give a prize less than the lab assistants wages necessary to even seriously look at the problem for 10 years.

      Cheep, Cheep, Cheep.

      --Mike--

      • Re:250 grand?? For pulling breathable air from dir (Score:4, Interesting)

        by jdray ( 645332 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @06:19PM (#12601210) Homepage Journal
        That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it? Generating light by means of electricity in a fashion that's repeatable by manufacturing techniques of the day and cheap enough for the common man was an incredible achievement and required significant technological advance for the time. We already have many industrial processes for extracting oxygen from oxides (often used for purifying oxidized metals, not recovering the oxygen itself). This prize is just for developing a system that packages those processes in a way that they can be used on the moon. Furthermore, it's not like NASA is asking the developer to warrant the stability of the process or any such thing, just come up with a viable method. Years of development will come afterward, and it might not even be with the prizewinner's system if the second runner up, six months later, comes up with a system that works better.

        • We already have many industrial processes for extracting oxygen from oxides (often used for purifying oxidized metals, not recovering the oxygen itself). This prize is just for developing a system that packages those processes in a way that they can be used on the moon.

          I was going to say, if you want oxygen from oxides, why not just use a strong reducing agent? Or would that just make water vapor? I know many reducing agents are hydrides (sodium borohydride and such) but even if they do donate proton

    • Hah!

      I did this years ago in the basement. However, for some unfathomable reason, my oxygen was of the unbreathable kind.

    • It might be a significant achievment, but there's no use for it at present.

      If you knew a way to solve the problem, your best bet would be taking the $250K. Your other choice would be trying to sell your idea when people are in desperate need for it, which is unlikely to happen in your lifetime.
    • Yeah, but it's a "byproduct" prize. If you fight a low-mass way for purifying tightly bonded metal-oxides (aluminum oxide, titanium oxide, etc), as many research projects on Earth are working towards, you simply need to capture the oxygen.

      One interesting thing I read about half a year ago, I recently was success in electrolysis directly on solid metal oxides instead of having to first melt them or dissolve them in another material (such as molten cryolite for aluminum refining). That might be a promising

  • First team of scientists? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:27PM (#12600958)
    Dear NASA

    I have a small team, and I do mean small team that is quite good at extracting things from the ground. Does it matter if they are not scientists?

    Yours etc.

    Snow White

  • I'll top that... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cylix ( 55374 ) * on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:27PM (#12600964) Homepage Journal
    I'll give 200 Million Dollars for the first team who can complete my contest.

    "Turn Lead Into Gold"

    (Winning contestants may see light of day again... jk... not really)

    • Re:I'll top that... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cyberfunk2 ( 656339 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:32PM (#12600987)
      It's been done, with a supercollider.. by bombarding lead atoms with the appropriate particles to knock out enough subatomic particles to bring the proton (and hence electron) count to 79, which is Au's atomic #.

      There is a report (1972) in which Soviet physicists at a nuclear research facility near Lake Baikal in Siberia accidentally discovered a "reaction" for turning lead into gold when they found the lead shielding of an experimental reactor had changed to gold.

      Note: any reaction tranmuting one element into another is by definition no longer chemistry, but nuclear physics.

      (I'm a chemist).

  • NASA's budget cuts are starting to show (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HillaryWBush ( 882804 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:27PM (#12600965)
    So, is that 11 pounds on earth, or on the moon? And if you can do this, why accept just $250,000 for what could be the biggest invention in human history?

    • Re:NASA's budget cuts are starting to show (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:30PM (#12600979)
      That's 11 pounds in British currency, I presume.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:35PM (#12601007)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Any company funding this is probably going to want patents. Maybe that's NASA's plan: convince researchers who want to take the prize home themselves to try this with company funding, give the prize to the researchers, license the patent from the company at a cost lower than doing the work themselves, leave the company to make money from other commercial spacefaring entities. It could work...

        For something that they can/will depend on this heavily, it seems rather silly to take into account that another

        • But NASA is the government. Part of it, anyways.

          What do you bet that if they had to do it, they could trounce any patents?

          Of course, they won't have to do it. With government funding, they would be willing to pay far higher than any corporation for the same thing. It's not like it's real money for them.

      • Re:Quantities... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by zippthorne ( 748122 )
        Remember that solid forms of matter take up MUCH less space than gaseious forms of matter. If you look at the chemical composition of the regolith, you can find out the % that is oxygen and thus extrapolate the minimum amouht of regolith that could produce the required oxygen provided you can come up with an ideal reaction. the "infrastructure" required shouldn't be very many orders bigger than the raw materials themselves, no? also, there are 1000 liters in a cubic meter. so 3.7 cubic meters is not all

    • Re:NASA's budget cuts are starting to show (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dinosaur Neil ( 86204 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:41PM (#12601043)

      Actually, the challenge is for 5kg (mass) of O2, but the units just got dumbed down for those who don't to metric. Extracting O2 from soil is done all the time on Earth, we just tend to treat the oxygen as an unnecessary byproduct while we keep the useful things (e.g. most metals); this will probbably not be "the biggest invention in human history"...

      • Re:NASA's budget cuts are starting to show (Score:4, Informative)

        by StarsAreAlsoFire ( 738726 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @08:49PM (#12602239)
        Extracting O2 from soil is done all the time on Earth, we just tend to treat the oxygen as an unnecessary byproduct while we keep the useful things (e.g. most metals);

        And on this contest it sounds like the byproducts will be aluminium and silicon... and those will be discarded. Which is why I think the contest is poorly worded, and will lead to an inferior 'winning entry'.

        Why throw away ultra pure silicon and aluminium just to get oxygen? With a slight increase in complexity you get a sweet refinery that can produce O2, Si and Al, as well as iron and titanium in much smaller quantities.

        Sample rock break down, I figure this is *fairly* representative, but I just picked a random rock from the below link (by weight %):

        SiO2 - 44.94
        Al2O3 - 35.71
        CaO - 20.57
        Na2O - 0.384
        MgO - 0.53
        Fe - 0.2
        Ti - 0.018

        Here is a page on the moon rock samples:
        http://www-curator.jsc.nasa.gov/curator/lunar/lsc/ index.htm [nasa.gov]

        Each link is a PDF which contains, amoung other things, a breakdown of the mineral composition of the rock in question.
        • I was curious, so conversion to mass percent:

          SiO2: 0.53 * 44.94% = 23.8%
          Al2O3: 0.47 * 35.71% = 16.8%
          CaO: 0.29 * 20.57% = 6.0%
          Na2O: 0.26 * 0.384% = 0.1%
          MgO: 0.40 * 0.53% = 0.2%
          -----------
          total = 46.9% oxygen by mass in that rock. I couldn't find how much moon dust would be available for processing. I wonder the percent yield necessary to win the contest . . .

    • ...if you can do this, why accept just $250,000 for what could be the biggest invention in human history?

      It's only big if you're founding a lunar colony, and I don't see that happening in our lifetimes. That would require regular, safe passenger and freight service into deep space, and nobody's every been serious about funding that. Instead of we've expensive demos like the Apollo and Shuttle programs, which both have significant accomplishments, but neither of which have done jack towards creating a re

    • I can tell someone either slept through physics or didn't read the NASA contest description. There, it's specified in kilograms (mass) rather than pounds (either force or mass). So whoever translated kilograms into pounds was probably using Earth pounds for their reference, not Moon pounds.

  • In related news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Robotdog ( 669611 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:28PM (#12600969)
    Maiden offers first child for someone to spin gold from straw.

  • Darn, I was only able to extract ozone (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:30PM (#12600978)
    I guess it's back to square one for me.
  • this seems pretty easy to do. according to a published paper (http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplore/Exploration /EXLibrary/DOCS/EIC050.HTML [nasa.gov]), JSC-1 contains several oxides including SiO2 and CaO.

    • Deoxygenating SiO2 and CaO (Score:5, Informative)

      by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @06:05PM (#12601150)
      The challenge is to rip those oxygen atoms from the silicon and calcium atoms. This is hard because they are tightly bound. Moreover, I doubt NASA would be interested in any process that consumes some other non-moon-available chemical (trading 5 lbs oxygen for 10 lbs of a reducing agent). I suspect that some sort of electrolysis [kyoto-u.ac.jp] might do the trick, but even that might be outside the power budget.
      • I was thinking the same thing. The process would have to be electric; if it is, they have an unlimited supply of virtually atmosphere-unimpeded solar energy.
        • they have an unlimited supply of virtually atmosphere-unimpeded solar energy

          Yes and no, unfortunately. Unless they put the installation where they get almost perpetual sun [bbc.co.uk] they are going to face a long night every lunar month. The plus side of the polar regions might be the availability of hydrogen, which might be in the form of water (easily separated in to O2 and H2) or in some other form. Hydrogen could be used to help reduce the lunar rock oxides to release the oxygen. Of course, perching a moon
      • Power budget? Surely the bright side of the moon could be populated with a significant number of solar panels? endless energy except for the occassional eclipse!
      • Another challenge (and one I wonder if NASA is going to require) is for the machinery to be vacuum and dust resistant; ie, not vulnerable to vacuum cementing of moving parts (we're moving rock grains thru it, there will be moving parts and lots of dust problems)

        As another poster pointed out, it'd probably be electric - but I would think that the waste heat from a nuclear reactor might be enough. Unless our battery technology improves radically - or unless we locate the base at one of the permanent sunli
  • Lb-mass or Lb-force? On earth it makes no difference, but we're talking moondust here. Those NASA guys and their units, you would think they would know better.
    • Yes, the rest of the world uses kilograms.

    • Re:Pounds? (Score:5, Informative)

      by stewby18 ( 594952 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @06:16PM (#12601200)

      From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

      If neither "avoirdupois" nor "troy" is specified, the international pound (avoirdupois) is meant and is by law the only proper definition in the United States

      So the answer seems pretty clearly to be mass. It's even more clear if you read the actual NASA page [nasa.gov] about it, which gives it in kilograms, rather than blaming NASA for Wired's use of a marginally ambiguous unit.

  • That was my science fair project! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dyfet ( 154716 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:35PM (#12601010) Homepage
    When I was in seventh grade, that was actually my science fair project (true story, I guess that was ?1975?). Oxygen from moon rocks. Hint: I used a nice big concave mirror I convinced the school to get for me, and as one can imagine, I had a lot of fun with it! Soon thereafter I lost interest though, once I discovered the far greater joy of homemade Thermite. I will take my $250K now please, thank you very much!


  • Space.com (Score:2, Informative)

    by RaffiRai ( 870648 )
    Here's the link [space.com] to the Space.com story published on the 19th.

  • Why do I get the bad feeling... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by howman ( 170527 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:49PM (#12601078)
    That someone will figure out how to actually do this and the boys at NASA will set off some sort of unstoppable chain reaction that turns the whole moon to oxygen resulting in a not so cool parralell to an accedent on Klingons moon, and with no Keanu Reeves in sight to miraculusly reverse the whole thing by pulling the plug on the sound generatior and releasing the white papers to be published on /.?

  • Why bother? (Score:2, Funny)

    by mothlos ( 832302 )
    Aliens already figured it out. I saw this documentary where they activated this giant machine and that is how they made the Martian atmosphere breathable for humans. Why don't they just utilize that tech?
  • 1. Get Bunch of moon rocks
    2. Offer to trade moon rocks to a medical supply company for a tank full of oxygen
    3. ???
    4. Profit!
  • Give me a beachside cottage in Bali, two beautiful female promiscuous lab assistants, 500 bottles of tequila, and I WILL FIND THE ANSWER.

    P.S. I am not a crank.

  • Easy... (Score:2, Funny)

    by N1ghtFalcon ( 884555 )
    This is an easy one... You just take some moon dust into your hand and start squeezing. O2 will begin rising from the top, and H2O (this is an added bonus) will be dripping from the bottom. If it doesn't work, you're not squeezing hard enough!

    Now what's this I hear about some reward?
  • I'm in. I just need some sample material to start with. NASA, are you supplying the raw materials?

  • Already a solution? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bananatree3 ( 872975 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @06:06PM (#12601154)
    I just came across this project that seems to have already found a good method to extract O2 from Lunar Dust: http://www.asi.org/adb/04/03/10/04/ [asi.org]

    seems like they know what they're doing, and that they have been working on it for a while!

  • Poorly writtten story (Score:3, Informative)

    by windowpain ( 211052 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @06:11PM (#12601185) Journal
    "Inventors will have just eight hours to extract at least 11 pounds of breathable oxygen from a simulated form of lunar soil."

    This should be rewritten to something along the lines of:

    "To win, a team will have to develop a process that can extract at least 11 pounds of oxygen in an eight hour period" The deadline is June 1, 2008.
    • You could make this even more funny by just locking in the inventors with some lunar soil amd their machinery in an airtight room and just wait a few days.
      If they are still alive, it obviously works :)
  • I'm sorry, but if you figure out a way to make the moon inhabitable, you better damn well score more than a quarter mill off the deal.
    • > if you figure out a way to make the moon inhabitable, you better damn well score
      > more than a quarter mill off the deal.

      I think I've already figured out how to make it inhabitable. Give me $10,000 and I'll tell you.
  • Searching the nasa and related web sites, I was unable to find anything more specific than the article provides. All I found was an email list you can sign up for. When you subscribe, what you get is commands you can send to the server to fetch files. This is slow going, this is the second day, and all I've got back so far is a "list".
    Anyway to sign up, you send an email with no subject and containing only the word "subscribe" to "majordomo@spinoza.public.hq.nasa.gov".
    Here is the result of the list comma
  • 5 Kg mass O2 (desired)

    156.25 moles O2

    625 moles e- (assume electrolysis, starting oxidation state -2)

    28800 seconds (8 hours to get it done)

    3.76375E+26 no. electrons (you've got to xfer these)

    6.24E+18 electrons/coulomb (def.)

    60316506 coulombs

    2094 total Amps (C/s)

    -->262 amp-hr equivalent battery necessary to make 5 kg O2 in 8 hrs assuming perfect efficiency.

    Will be interesting to see what contraints NASA set on the system design. One assumes that they would not reward sol
  • ...from a simulated form of lunar soil.
    Riiiiiiiiight, so if NASA have manufactured this lunar soil, then presumably they should know how to get the O2 back out!. Failing that, assuming somebody manages this (though $250k is a little cheap considering the savings NASA would make) whats to say it won't work with actual, real lunar soil?

    • Re:Wha.....? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bill Walker ( 835082 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @07:29PM (#12601784)
      Riiiiiiiiight, so if NASA have manufactured this lunar soil, then presumably they should know how to get the O2 back out!

      Really? I know how to manufacture a quiche, but I don't think I could get just the eggs back out of it.

    • Re:Wha.....? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tftp ( 111690 )
      The question is not how to get it out, but how to get it out quickly, efficiently and without external chemicals or supplies. As someone already said above, it's not interesting to extract 5 kg of anything by using up 10 kg of something else that is equally unavailable on the Moon.
    • Please... read the details before you post.

      This is some volcanic ash that has a chemical composition that is very similar to the samples that were brought back during the Apollo missions. You know, gas chromatigraphs and other methods to identify the chemical composition in a piece of rock. This was done quite thouroughally when the lunar samples came back, and a major effort was done to try and come up with some similar earth-based mineral ore that could be used for experimental purposes in a laboratory

  • Just remember... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Aggrav8d ( 683620 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @07:07PM (#12601610) Homepage
    ...don't spend it on the moon. There your prize is only worth about $41.6k dollars.

  • Obviously, there is no elemental carbon available on the moon, but the problem of extracting oxygen may be relatively simple if one is allowed to use carbon brought in carbothermic reduction of the lunar soil in an airtight solar furnace.

    • The CO and CO2 products would be electrolysed in a separate step to yield C(s)(which could then be recycled back to the process), and breathable O2.

      The carbon would be reacted with various metal oxides present in lunar soil. FeO, which is up to 5% of lunar soil, is the most promising source of oxygen, given that it can be reduced more effectively at lower temperatures than SiO2, and the astronauts would likely find the resulting Fe useful. The most cumbersome part is probably be the furnace itself, whic

      • yeah, but high temperatures aren't a problem on the moon. I would imagine that creating a furnace with >3000K temps would take, what, 10 meters of mirrors?

        Turn that sh^t into plasma and seperate it magnetically. Or not. ;~)
        • Yeah, but could you create such a device that has a mass of less than 25 kg?

          For large-scale municipal oxygen plants of Tycho City, yeah, they might use such a system, but not likely for Ra III (assuming they use another sun god for the names of lunar missions).

  • Details lacking (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jmichaelg ( 148257 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @10:16PM (#12602669) Journal
    I couldn't find any details on the prize, i.e., what the design parameters are.

    The lunar environment is so radically different there that it changes a lot of the design parameters. Structures weigh 1/6 as much there as they do here. Build a structure that is strong enough for Lunar gravity and it'll collapse here. You've got both a 250 degree F heat source and -250 degrees heatsink readily available on the Moon which makes for a nice heat engine but again, it only works on the Moon.

    There are other significant differences so I'm curious whether NASA plans on testing the machines using Earth design rules or Moon design rules.

    • Re:Details lacking (Score:5, Informative)

      by Teancum ( 67324 ) <robert_horning@@@netzero...net> on Saturday May 21, 2005 @10:43PM (#12602776) Homepage Journal
      I would suggest that you look more at this article from New Scientist:

      http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7403 [newscientist.com]

      The big deal is that you are going to be given a lunar soil simulant (they say that getting the real stuff is just too expensive to do anything but a final proof test with) that comes from a volcanic ash deposit near Flagstaff, AZ. For a small fee a research team can obtain samples of this simulant for experimental purposes.

      It must put out at least 5 kg of oxygen (assuming that the time to produce this is limited to a short period of time... 24 hours or less), and the whole device must weight less than 25 kg. I would also guess that space considerations are also something to worry about, but that the weight of the device is a bigger deal.

      I guess the Wired news article says 11 kg in 8 hours.

      In short, it is something that should fit in a foot locker that astronauts could pull out and set up once another lunar mission actually occurs.

      This is a bigger deal than the tether challenge, and something that has some hard short-term practical applications in the space industry. Also, the $250,000 is something you can pay a research team to do more than hold a pizza party afterward with when you win. If you already have a minerology lab, this would be worth pulling a couple of interns/lab assistants over to wrap their energies around. And potentially some very nice contracts in the future if NASA gets off their behind and gets back to the moon.

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