Hawaiian Soil Simulates Lunar Environment

NASA recently concluded nearly two weeks of testing equipment and lunar rover concepts on Hawaii's volcanic soil. The agency's In Situ Resource Utilization Project, which studies ways astronauts can use resources found at landing sites, demonstrated how people might prospect for resources on the moon and make their own oxygen from lunar rocks and soil.

The tests helped NASA gain valuable information about systems that could enable a sustainable and affordable lunar outpost by minimizing the amount of water and oxygen that must be transported from Earth. The Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems, known as PISCES and based at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, hosted the tests. Research teams and NASA experts held the tests of several NASA-developed systems in Hawaii because its volcanic soil is very similar to regolith, the moon's soil.

NASA's lunar exploration plan currently projects that on-site lunar resources could generate one to two metric tons of oxygen annually. This is roughly the amount of oxygen that four to six people living at a lunar outpost might breathe in a year. The field demonstrations in Hawaii showed how lunar materials might be extracted. It also showcased the hydrogen reduction system used to manufacture oxygen from those materials and how the oxygen would be stored. These experiments help engineers and scientists spot complications that might not be obvious in laboratories.

A prototype system combines a polar prospecting rover and a drill specifically designed to penetrate the harsh lunar soil. The rover's system demonstrates small-scale oxygen production from regolith. A similar rover could search for water ice and volatile gases such as hydrogen, helium, and nitrogen, in the permanently-shadowed craters of the moon's poles. Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh built the rover, which carries equipment known as the Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction.

Larger, complementary systems that might produce oxygen from soil on an outpost-sized scale are known as ROxygen and the Precursor ISRU Lunar Oxygen Testbed, or PILOT.

FMI: www.nasa.gov/exploration, http://pisces.uhh.hawaii.edu/