The European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen a team from the United Kingdom led by Thales Alenia Space to design and construct an experimental system to extract oxygen from lunar soil. The collaboration, which consists of four companies: AVS, Metalysis, Open University, and Redwire Space Europe, would construct a tiny piece of equipment allowing scientists to assess the feasibility of bigger lunar plants. These lunar plants would, interestingly, create fuel for spaceships, as well as metallic raw materials for equipment and breathing air for astronauts.
According to ESA, the team’s equipment will have to extract 50-100 kilos of oxygen from lunar soil, with a target of 70% extraction. The instrument would also have to offer exact performance and gas concentration data. All of this must be accomplished in ten days while the gadget is powered by solar energy collected over the course of a single fortnight-long lunar day. As per ESA, the returning lunar regolith sample reveals that it is made up of 40–45 percent oxygen, however, it is inaccessible for immediate use since it is chemically linked up as oxides in the form of crystals or glass.
David Binns, Systems Engineer at ESA’s Concurrent Design Facility (CDF), said, ‘The payload needs to be compact, low power and able to fly on a range of potential lunar landers’.
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He went on to say that the apparatus should be able to extract oxygen and usable metals from moonrock. The technology will be a game-changer for lunar exploration, allowing international adventurers to return to the Moon without the need for long and expensive terrestrial supply lines. The agency recently released a concept for a novel gadget that would protect astronauts from chemical burns to their skin or lungs if they were exposed to them without protection.
The new instrument is now in development, with the goal of identifying regions of highly oxidising material on the Moon and even Mars that might cause chemical burns. This gadget, too, is being intended to create oxygen using a process known as ‘oxygen farming’.
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