Along with advances in space exploration, we have recently invested a great deal of time and money on technologies that can make possible the effective use of space resources and the best way to produce oxygen on the Moon. Special attention has been paid to the search. In October, the Australian Space Agency and NASA signed an agreement to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon under the Artemis program, aiming to collect lunar rocks that could eventually provide breathable oxygen to the Moon.
Although the Moon has an atmosphere of its own, it is very thin and is composed mostly of hydrogen, neon and argon. This is not the kind of gaseous mixture that can sustain oxygen-dependent mammals like humans. According to this, there is actually plenty of oxygen on the Moon. It is not only in gaseous form. Instead it is trapped in a layer of rock covering the Moon and a fine dust called regolith. If we could extract oxygen from this layer, would it be enough to sustain human life on the Moon?
source of oxygen
Oxygen can be found in many minerals in the land around us. And the Moon is made up of most of the same rocks you’d find on Earth (though with slightly higher amounts of material that came from meteors). Minerals like silica, aluminum, and iron and magnesium oxides abound on the Moon. All these minerals contain oxygen, but not in a form that can reach our lungs. These minerals exist in a few different forms on the Moon, including hard rock, dust, gravel and surface-covering stones. This material has been collected there over countless millennia from meteorites crashing onto the lunar surface. Some people refer to the upper layer of the Moon as “soil”, but as a soil scientist I hesitate to use the term . Soil as we know it is a very magical thing that only happens on earth.
It has been formed over millions of years by a vast range of organisms acting on the basic material of the soil. Earth’s soil is endowed with remarkable physical, chemical and biological characteristics. Meanwhile, the material on the surface of the Moon is basically regolith in its original, untouched form.
One substance goes in, two come out. The regolith of the Moon is made up of about 45% oxygen. But that oxygen is tightly bound in the minerals mentioned above. To break those strong bonds, we need to put in energy.
How much oxygen can the Moon provide?
According to this, when we manage to pull it off, how much oxygen can the Moon actually deliver? Well, if it can be extracted, then very much. If we ignore the oxygen trapped in the deep hard rocks of the Moon – and consider only the regolith that is readily available on the surface – then we can come up with some guesses. Each cubic meter of regolith contains an average of 1.4 tons of minerals, including about 630 kilograms of oxygen. NASA says that humans need to breathe about 800 grams of oxygen a day to survive. So 630 kg of oxygen would keep a person alive for about two years (or just more).
Now let’s assume that the average depth of the regolith on the Moon is about ten meters, and we can extract all the oxygen from it. This means that the top ten meters of the Moon’s surface will provide enough oxygen for all eight billion people on Earth to breathe for about 100,000 years. It will also depend on how effectively we are able to extract and use oxygen. Will stay However, this figure is quite amazing! So we should do everything possible to protect the blue planet – and especially its soil – which supports all terrestrial life to survive without us trying.
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