{"id":23220,"date":"2018-02-05T17:30:56","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T22:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/?p=23220"},"modified":"2022-03-16T12:11:48","modified_gmt":"2022-03-16T16:11:48","slug":"mining-moon-water-rocket-fuel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/mining-moon-water-rocket-fuel\/","title":{"rendered":"Mining the Moon for Water to Generate Rocket Fuel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Imagine if the moon could generate all of the fuel for future space exploration. Well, that is part of the plan to <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/today.ucf.edu\/ucf-seeks-new-way-mine-moon-water\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">mine the moon for water,<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> a new mission for <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/planets.ucf.edu\/people\/researchers\/philip-metzger\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dr. Philip (Phil) Metzger<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a planetary scientist with the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/fsi.ucf.edu\/about\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Florida Space Institute<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (FSI) at the University of Central Florida, and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/fsi.ucf.edu\/person\/julie-brisset\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Julie Brisset<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a research associate with FSI. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Their new contract with United Launch Alliance (ULA) calls for them to develop a viable method for extracting water from the depths of the moon cheaply and efficiently.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ulalaunch.com\/about-ula.aspx\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">ULA<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and The Boeing Company that was formed in 2006 for the purpose of providing reliable and cost-efficient space launch services for NASA and other U.S. governmental agencies.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The project will be led by Metzger, who worked at Kennedy Space Center for nearly three decades and co-founded the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/technology-ksc.ndc.nasa.gov\/featurestory\/swampworks\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">KSC Swamp Works<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> &#8212; a hands-on <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">lab that accelerates innovation to benefit NASA and the Earth &#8212; <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">before joining UCF. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The presence of water on the moon both near the moon\u2019s pole and on the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jpl.nasa.gov\/news\/news.php?release=2009-147\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">surface of the moon <\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">is supported by data from various space missions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"NASA | Water on the Moon\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qYW4rTrAA5I?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><b>Why mine the moon for water?<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The ability to mine lunar bodies of water would advance ULA\u2019s goal, as water could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to generate rocket fuel in space. The ability to refuel in space opens the door to more launch possibilities and lower transportation costs throughout lunar space and beyond. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The mined water could be used for other purposes as well, including life support systems, radiation shielding and drinking water for space explorers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It could also help ULA fulfill its vision of a self-sustaining space economy in CisLunar, the space between the Earth and the moon.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Dt8bs8E6XOY\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Dt8bs8E6XOY<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIt is vital for humanity to get beyond the limits of this single planet,\u201d said Metzger. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cOur civilization has grown so much that we are over-stressing the planet, driving species to extinction, polluting the atmosphere and the ocean, and using up the best resources that developing nations would need to get to a better standard of living. We know how to put industry in space to address these global challenges, and mining water on the Moon is an economically viable first step. I am excited about lunar mining not just because it will make space exploration more affordable and produce better science in the solar system, but because it is on the critical path toward becoming a solar system species and solving the problems on planet Earth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>Proposed technique for mining water <\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Up until now, researchers seeking to mine the moon for water have focused on finding ways to collect the regolith of the moon, which has water locked in frigid ice chunks, and then transport it to processing plants on the moon. The regolith is the layer of unconsolidated rocky material covering the bedrock.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The multi-step approach, however, would require large equipment to remove the ice chunks and haul them to processing plants. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cWhen you talk about getting things into space, weight matters,\u201d Metzger said in a statement. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cSo we are looking at a technique that would require less stuff you have to transport which still gets the job done.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The proposed technique is to extract the water in situ, which would obviate the need for heavy construction equipment and remove the extra step of hauling the soil. It would involve drilling holes into the depths of the moon, pumping heat through the holes to heat the regolith, and collecting the released water vapor through pipes in the holes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Metzger came up with the idea of vaporizing the water in-place because of the common technique of using phase change of the ore &#8212; melting or vaporizing it &#8212; in mining and refining here on Earth, he said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIn space it is different because the entire Moon is in a hard vacuum, so instead of melting the ice will vaporize directly into steam,\u201d said Metzger.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u201cYears ago I did some computer modeling to see if the energy requirements were reasonable, and I concluded that they are. However, I never had a chance to work on it again. More recently, George Sowers (formerly chief engineer at the United Launch Alliance, or ULA, now with the Colorado School of Mines) came up with this idea on his own and asked me to help investigate it. ULA wants to be the customer of a lunar mining operation, so it is looking for ways that another company could operate less expensively. Vaporizing the water in-place seems to require less equipment than any other method, so it may produce the most affordable in-space water.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The technique could be used to mine water at different depths, but the optimum depth is a matter of cost-benefit analysis.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cWe know from NASA\u2019s LCROSS mission, where they impacted a spacecraft into a dark crater at the Moon\u2019s south pole, that the lunar water is mixed in the soil from the surface down to a depth of 2 or 3 meters or even deeper,\u201d said Metzger. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cWe can mine as shallow as we like, so it is a tradeoff of using more equipment and energy to mine deeper or moving your equipment more often to stay more shallow. Every time you start to mine a location, you heat the soil in that area. That represents an investment in energy that you don\u2019t want to casually walk away from. So if you can keep getting water more deeply from that same location, then you have an incentive to keep doing so. Ultimately we will not know the answer to this question until after we do the research. We will study how efficient it is to mine at varying depths.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>Viability of proposed technique<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Metzger and Brisset have to determine if their technique is realistic and cost-effective. Brisset, who has multiple degrees in mechanical and space engineering and in physics, will develop the algorithms to run the computer simulations that they hope will lead to a viable model. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While heating the regolith is possible according to data they possess, they need \u201cto figure out the right geometric configuration of the holes to increase the area that is heated,\u201d Brisset said in a statement. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Otherwise, most of the heat would dissipate, and be wasted.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u201cIf we do it right, we should be able to increase the area and the time it stays warm,\u201d she added. \u201cWe will be doing a lot of modeling.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Metzger believes that he and his team could build the necessary hardware to implement the technique within three years if NASA wanted it within that time frame and made funding available.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThere would still be significant risk that it might not work, though, because we lack enough information about the state of the soil and ice in those dark lunar craters,\u201d he said. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cSo if we built this system and sent it there, it might have less than 50 percent chance of producing as much water as we hope.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For a more certain outcome, Metzger would prefer to get more information on the state of the soil first.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cSo a smarter approach is to do some prospecting first,\u201d he said. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cSend a rover to drive around, measuring the soil properties and the distribution of the ice. NASA has been developing such a mission, the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/resource-prospector\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Resource Prospector Mission<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, which will go to the moon around 2022. That mission will not go into the deepest craters where the most water is, because it would be a more challenging mission without solar energy, without direct line-of-sight communications back to Earth, and with the extreme temperatures and access requirements. Nevertheless we should do prospecting in the crater. After we know the state of the soil, it will then take only 2 or 3 years to build the hardware and send it to begin mining, if there is adequate startup funding.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine if the moon could generate all of the fuel for future space exploration. Well, that is part of the plan to mine the moon for water, a new mission for Dr. Philip (Phil) Metzger, a planetary scientist with the Florida Space Institute (FSI) at the University of Central Florida, and Julie Brisset, a research [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":45485,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[637,233,230,229,252],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alternative-energy","category-sustainable","category-news","category-lead-stories","category-university-of-central-florida"],"aioseo_notices":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Mining-The-Moon-For-Water-To-Generate-Rocket-Fuel.jpg",830,533,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Mining-The-Moon-For-Water-To-Generate-Rocket-Fuel-224x144.jpg",224,144,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Mining-The-Moon-For-Water-To-Generate-Rocket-Fuel-300x193.jpg",300,193,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Mining-The-Moon-For-Water-To-Generate-Rocket-Fuel.jpg",830,533,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Mining-The-Moon-For-Water-To-Generate-Rocket-Fuel.jpg",830,533,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Mining-The-Moon-For-Water-To-Generate-Rocket-Fuel.jpg",830,533,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Mining-The-Moon-For-Water-To-Generate-Rocket-Fuel.jpg",830,533,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Susan Chu","author_link":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/author\/susan-chu\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Imagine if the moon could generate all of the fuel for future space exploration. Well, that is part of the plan to mine the moon for water, a new mission for Dr. Philip (Phil) Metzger, a planetary scientist with the Florida Space Institute (FSI) at the University of Central Florida, and Julie Brisset, a research&hellip;","featured_media_src_url":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Mining-The-Moon-For-Water-To-Generate-Rocket-Fuel.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}