Plans to extract oxygen from lunar soil could meet resistance – here’s why

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Learning to use water ice trapped in deeply shadowed craters, or how to extract oxygen from regolith, the lunar soil, known as “in situ resource utilization,” could be key to such long-term operations. But a new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, for instance, found that electrolysis systems in low gravity environments like those of the Moon and Mars could be less efficient than on Earth. But because the typical method for studying the effects of low gravity conditions on Earth — boarding a airplane and letting the pilot fly it through a series of steep parabolic climbs and dives — would be hazardous with molten materials, Dr Lomax and her colleagues used a small water electrolysis cell to stand in for a higher temperature electrolysis cell. I think it will have to make us think a lot more about the anode and cathode materials and how they’re fabricated, because that will promote or degrade bubble growth quite a bit.” It’s not necessary to engineer reliable lunar regolith electrolysis systems to simply go to the Moon, Mr Sanders notes, as the Apollo program utilised no such technology.