Oxygen on Moon? NASA’s new discovery may be a scientific breakthrough

NASA researchers at Houston’s Johnson Space Centre have successfully extracted oxygen from a synthetic substance that replicates the chemistry of lunar soil in a vacuum condition. This achievement may lead to the creation of a long-term human presence on the Moon’s surface and may even result in lunar colonisation.

The capacity to extract oxygen from lunar soil is crucial not just for providing oxygen-rich air to astronauts on the Moon but also for using it as fuel for space transportation and future missions to space. According to Aaron Paz, a senior researcher at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre, this kind of technology has the potential to produce multiple times its weight in oxygen every year on the Moon’s surface, enabling a long-term human presence in the Moon.

How was the experiment conducted?

In a recent study, NASA’s CaRD team used a specialised spherical capsule known as the Dirty Thermal Vacuum Chamber, measuring 15 feet in diameter, to undertake an experiment under lunar-like circumstances. The researchers used a carbothermal reactor inside the chamber to warm the lunar soil simulant and produce oxygen. For many years, scientists have used the Carbothermal reduction method to create various goods such as solar panels and steel, which includes creating carbon monoxide or dioxide through the use of very high temperatures.

The NASA team used an extremely powerful laser to simulate the heat produced by a solar energy concentrator and liquefy the lunar soil simulant inside a carbothermal reactor to acquire oxygen. After heating the soil, the researchers used the Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo) equipment to detect carbon monoxide.

To use this technology for collecting oxygen on the Moon, the carbothermal reactor must be able to sustain pressure to prevent gases from leaking into space while also allowing lunar material to pass through and leave the reaction zone. The CaRD researchers verified that the carbothermal reactor could sustain pressure to avoid leakage of gases while permitting lunar material to travel in and out of the reaction zone by conducting the experiment in a vacuum environment that simulated the lunar surface. 

Anastasia Ford, an engineer at NASA and the CaRD experiment director at Johnson Space Centre stated that “the research group has shown that the CaRD reactor has the capacity to succeed on the lunar surface and produce oxygen successfully.” According to Ford, “This is an important step in the creation of the infrastructure necessary to establish sustainable human settlements on other planets.”