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Moon China

Chinese Scientists Use Lunar Soil To Produce Water, State Media Reports (reuters.com) 38

Posted by BeauHD from the brand-new-methods dept.
Chinese scientists have developed a new method to produce significant quantities of water from lunar soil brought back by the Chang'e-5 mission in 2020, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The "brand-new method" involves heating moon minerals containing hydrogen to generate water vapor, which could be crucial for future lunar research stations and space exploration. Reuters reports: "After three years of in-depth research and repeated verification, a brand-new method of using lunar soil to produce large amounts of water was discovered, which is expected to provide important design basis for the construction of future lunar scientific research stations and space stations," said CCTV. The discovery could have important implications for China's decades-long project of building a permanent lunar outpost amid a U.S.-China race to find and mine the moon's resources.

Using the new method, one tonne of lunar soil will be able to produce about 51-76 kg of water, equivalent to more than a hundred 500ml bottles of water, or the daily drinking water consumption of 50 people, the state broadcaster said. China hopes that recent and future lunar expeditions will set the foundations to build the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), an initiative it is co-leading with Russia.
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Chinese Scientists Use Lunar Soil To Produce Water, State Media Reports More

Chinese Scientists Use Lunar Soil To Produce Water, State Media Reports

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  • OK, so heating the regolith to extract the hydrogen, got that.

    However, TFA doesn't indicate how much energy is required to do so.

    More importantly, it doesn't make any suggestion of where the oxygen is going to come from - or did someone forget the O part of H2O.

    • Probably from metal oxides in regolith (iron, titanium, sodium).

      • Possibly, although extracting free oxygen from, for example, iron oxide is itself a non-trivial process requiring hydrochloric acid and a fair amount of energy.

        It would be interesting if someone more familiar with these things could run the numbers and come up with a kilos-of-regolith/litre and energy/litre for lunar water.

        • Well it is beyond my first year chemistry uni courses — I majored into biology so I never didn't touch any chemistry after first year except for biochemistry.

          There may be some areas of the moon with higher levels of illumination from the sun (Lunar South Pole, etc?) so solar might be possible but I would wager "Atomic power on the Moon, LETS GO!!!!!" will be written on the margins in the paper. Bootstrapping entire ecosystem to keep people living on the moon as a semi-permanent would require an insane

    • Exactly. TFA provides no details. Omitting the source of oxygen is fishy, it is the majority of mass in water. Maybe import the 50 kilos of oxygen needed for 55 kilos of water from earth?

    • Re:What about the oxygen? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tragedy ( 27079 ) on Saturday August 24, 2024 @06:03AM (#64731376)

      I looked for another article with a little more information. Apparently the hydrogen from the solar wind gets trapped in a mineral called Ilmenite. So the heating is extracting hydrogen from that. It does not say it explicitly, but the formula for Ilmenite is FeTiO. 3. It looks though, like the thermal breakdown that releases hydrogen from it also may release oxygen. In any case, it certainly contains both the hydrogen and oxygen necessary to make water.
      Of course, the process to make this 50 or so liters of water from a ton of regolith also melts the ton of regolith. There's little point in wasting that. The lava created might be usable as a building material. It might be castable into blocks, or directly into structures. Depending on the rest of the composition, it might be extrudable, etc. So they might be able to do this as part of construction and collect the water as a side effect. Ultimately, 50 liters of water is a lot somewhere like the moon. Especially since, with various processes, you can use it again and again and again. That could mean drinking it the first time, then doing reverse or forward osmosis, then drinking it again or, the second time around using it for showers or dishes or even just to flush toilets or water plants or other gray water uses. Or, instead of just filtering it clean, since we're already apparently in an environment where energy is in reasonable supply, just distill it into fresh water again. Whatever process you use, you should be able to lose 10% or less each time around. That means ultimately about 10X re-use of water in terms of volume. So 50 liters of water could be used like 500 liters of water, which is enough water for a full grown male human to get all they need to drink for 125 days. So, to support the drinking needs of an astronaut, you would need to melt about three tons of regolith. To also provide them enough oxygen for a year, you need about .84 kg of oxygen per day, which works out to the oxygen in .945 kg of water. We'll just round up to 1 kg of water per day. That can't be recycled like the water (although you can extract O2 from CO2 through various means) so you would need the water from about 7.3 tons of regolith for that. So, sort of a minimum would be about 10.3 tons of regolith per astronaut per year. That's actually not too bad. Plus, of course, you could have plants converting some CO2 back to O2. You could even directly convert CO2 to O2. There are a number of possible processes for that. One of the simplest is just to cook it at high temperature and it will thermally break down. You'll end up with 02 and CO and carbon. So if you keep removing the carbon residue and use a technique like pressure swing adsorption to extract the O2, you can keep breaking down what's left until all you have is carbon and O2. It's an energy intensive process, but it should work to both dispose of scrubbed CO2 and recycle oxygen.

      • "Ilmenite (FeTiO3), also known as iron titanium oxide, has a melting point of around 1470C"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          I found a melting point for it of 1050 Celcius. Of course, limenite can have varying composition, so maybe different compositions melt and thermally break down at varying temperatures.

    • Earths atmosphere....
      , there was a big story about this like 2 years ago when they found rusty patches on the moon.
      https://www.nasa.gov/solar-sys... [nasa.gov] our Moon is airless,the Red Planet its hue.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Chinese Scientists Use Lunar Soil To Produce Water, State Media Reports

    While US space nerds dream of life as tech priests in Fabricator-General Elon Musk's colony on Mars, China is busy doing mundane research for a much more practical lunar base. Move along now ... nothing but the usual to see here ...

    • As if Elon would settle for anything less than being the Omnissiah itself.

      • Chinese Scientists Use Lunar Soil To Produce Water, State Media Reports

        While US space nerds dream of life as tech priests in Fabricator-General Elon Musk's colony on Mars, China is busy doing mundane research for a much more practical lunar base. Move along now ... nothing but the usual to see here ...

        As if Elon would settle for anything less than being the Omnissiah itself.

        Until he gains access to the Immaterium and the possible elevation to godhood that comes with it Elon will simply have to lower his expectations an endure his current existence as a puppet of Tzeentch.

  • I was wondering why the water was in kg and not L? Also did they really need to convert the 1kg=1L using 500mL bottles? Would it not have been clearer to say 51-76 L of water? More so when you are on the Moon where 1L remains 1L where are 1kg on the Moon is either 1kg if you are talking mass or 1/6kg if you talking apparent weight, I think. Google the issue and it is easy to be confused whereas just simply using L would be the safer option.

    • If the water is pure then it has predictable mass for its volume, so does it really matter?

      I'm more interested in the "how are they planning to cook tons of regolith" question.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfm3 ( 830843 )
      Mass in kg is independent of the force of gravity, any measurement would be adjusted on the moon so that 1 kg on earth would still be 1 kg on the moon. That's not true for pounds which are a measure of weight, so your weight on the moon would be about 1/6 of your weight on earth but your mass would be the same.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Because when you're doing chemistry, you measure things in units of mass, which is the measure of "how much stuff." The kilogram is a unit of mass, which is the same everywhere.

      The SI unit of weight is the newton, or kg * m/s^2 in base units.

  • "51-76 kg of water, equivalent to more than a hundred 500ml bottles of water, or the daily drinking water consumption of 50 people"

    That is a pretty stupid way to say it. How about going produce 51 to 76 liter of water (1 Kg of water = 1 decimeter^3 = 1 liter at STP ....) to go through Kg OK but then count in 1/2 liter ? Makes no sense.

    • > but then count in 1/2 liter

      Is that the typical water bottle size people in their audience buy at the store?

      In the US it's more like 20oz so 0.6 liters or so.

      Anyway, most humans need a gallon per day, not a liter. Recyclable will be a must on the Moon.

    • No argument with you really. kg always refers to mass. "Apparent weight" is related to force in Newtons. So, 1kg at "standard gravity" exerts something like 9.1N. On the moon it would exert something more like 1.5N.

      I wish the US would switch to metric across the board, but this is one of those things that isn't a 1-to-1 comparison between metric and imperial and can be a bit confusing.

      The point I'm trying to make is, 1kg of water on the moon would still be 1L, but it wouldn't "weigh" 1kg because kg is n

  • Water content (Score:3)

    by Mendenhall ( 32321 ) on Saturday August 24, 2024 @07:48AM (#64731476)

    The real question is how deep the solar wind implantation has been stirred into the regolith. Direct penetration depth of solar wind protons is in the few-cm range. Mixing due to micrometeorite impact, which is what creates the regolith, stirs stuff down further, but the hydrogen-rich layer might be very thin. The possibility of 5% water weight is stunning, but to me that implies that it may all be very near the surface. That makes it easy to mine, of course, but means the total supply may be limited.

    • The surface area of the Moon is almost the same as that of Asia. Even if you're only taking the top cm or two, I don't think you're going to run out of water any time soon.

      You might run out of water near wherever you put your base, but this seems like the kind of thing that can be adequately resolved with an automated surface mining rover since handling the scraping up loose regolith is something well within the capabilities of today's computers.

  • University of Arizona Engineering built a machine in the 90's that makes bricks from (simulated) regolith and had water as a waste product. It was celebrated for a brief time.

    They apparently lost their funding for late-stage Empire spending on war and other depravity.

    I am heartened to see the Chinese have picked up the ball and are running with it for Team Humanity.

    There is a *lot* of abandoned research the Americans have done and failed to commercialize/scale. It's a goldmine for the hard-working and ambi

  • This is the kind of post that I enjoy seeing. China has a great resource of educated people, who can do and build amazing things. This is a far better use of Chinese lives than plotting to violently invade neighbors like Tibet and Taiwan (too late I guess on one of those).
    • One does not exclude the other. My only concern is that humanity advances in some way and doesn't perish in the process. Who does it, I don't give a rats ass about. Every empire ever has fallen, so will the current ones and the ones that come after. We just need to make sure that we don't fuck up the planet so badly that bacteria will be all that's left. We

  • There is much, much cheaper water and ice available, in bulk, at Saturn's rings. The needed solar sail harvesting technology is already well understood, and gets us bulk metals mining of the asteroid belt and bulk solar power satellite technology as well. It requires longer timescale investment, but being able to pilot tons or kilotons of icy asteroid into Lunar targets is well within the technology's limits, and could bring water to LEO for space industry.

  • 76 kilograms per ton (1000 kilograms) indicates the regolith is 7.6% water to begin with. We know from (admittedly low resolution) neutron spectroscopy measurements that the poles of the moon are about 20 times drier than that. The sunlit regions where most of the ilmenite is located is even drier than that.

    Maybe there is a spot on the moon where there is that much water, but we would need much MUCH better water prospecting missions to find it. And the only thing even close to a prospecting mission (VIPE

  • Every action has an impact. I wonder what it could be in this case.

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