Scientists found that oxygen on the Moon is very abundant and can be used to live billions of years. However, there are buts, unfortunately not in the form of gas.
In today's era, investment into technology that can enable the utilization of resources in space is actually very large. One of his keen focuses was on finding the best way to produce oxygen on the Moon.
In October, the Australian Space Agency and NASA signed a deal to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon under the Artemis program, with the aim of collecting lunar rock that could eventually provide breathable oxygen on the Moon.
Although the Moon has an atmosphere, it is very thin and consists mostly of hydrogen, neon, and argon. This is not the kind of gas mixture that can sustain oxygen-dependent mammals like humans.
It is said that there is actually a lot of oxygen on the Moon. Just not in gas form. Instead, it is trapped within the regolith, a layer of rock and fine dust that covers the Moon's surface. Extracting oxygen from the regolith also requires substantial industrial equipment. We must first convert the solid metal oxide into a liquid form.
We also have the technology to do this on Earth, but moving this equipment to the Moon and generating enough energy to run it will be a huge challenge.
So, how much oxygen can the Moon provide? If we ignore the oxygen bound in the Moon's deeper rocky material and consider only the easily accessible regolith at the surface, we can make some guesses.
Each cubic meter of lunar regolith contains an average of 1.4 tons of minerals, including about 630 kg of oxygen. NASA says humans need to breathe about 800g of oxygen a day to survive. So 630 kg of oxygen will keep a person alive for about two years or more.
Now let's assume the average depth of the regolith on the Moon is about 10 meters, and we can extract all the oxygen from here. That means the top 10 meters of the Moon's surface will provide enough oxygen to support all 8 billion people on Earth for about 100,000 years.
Not to mention, the results can actually depend on how effectively we managed to extract the oxygen. Thus citing Science Alert, Friday (12/11/2021).
