Posted on 05/28/2015 4:02:36 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Extracting Water From the Moon With Basic Home Appliances
by Nancy Atkinson on October 6, 2008
http://www.universetoday.com/19244/extracting-water-from-the-moon-with-basic-home-appliances/
The opposite of Lunar Monolith?
Moon dirt is mostly pulverized glass. You don’t want to breathe it and would be pretty hard to grow things in.
That would be a polylith or a multilith
Depending where sampled, it is shock pulvarized basalt or anorthosite, mixed with microscopic vitric spherules resulting from impact remelt.
Thanks in part to “From the Earth to the Moon”, I understood that :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_%28miniseries%29
It might be a cool science experiment. However it is noticeably expensive to even pump liquid water out of a well from several hundred feet under the surface of Earth. It would be nearly prohibitive, energy-wise, to sublimate the water that resides deep under the surface as super-cold ice. It would require either a nuclear reactor (not going to happen any time soon) or a huge solar array. Cost of that water would be extreme; you'd be paying several kWh of power for every drop of water. The collection equipment is also something to have in mind... the plastic sheet from Home Depot won't really work in vacuum. You'd have to heat the entire block of soil, tens of feet deep, from -100C to 0C if you want gaseous water on the surface. I don't think we can do it even on Earth.
All in all, these attempts to set up a base on the Moon or Mars are probably not going to work. The technology is just not there yet, and the practical need is nowhere in sight. Colonization of another planet will require combined resources of the whole Earth and, outside of one-way trips, won't become realistic for another 100 years. Key factors in that timeline will be the new physics, new propulsion methods, and much cheaper spaceflight.
Interesting.
Thank you!
Oh, you said reg-olith, oops!
OTOH, the Moon does out-gas, according to geologists at Brown University, studying the surface in detail. Granted, they estimated at least as late as 10,000 years ago.
Just a note of interest, the closest thing resembling moondust that most humans are likely to encounter in their day-to-day lives is a freshly opened bag of portland cement.
“OTOH, the Moon does out-gas, “
Ironically, I’ve been often told my moons outgas as well.
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“Regolith” is, on earth, the layer of roughly weathered and fractured rock lying just over competent bedrock. Above that here is soil, formed through the action of chemical and biological processes.
Without liquid water and an atmosphere on the moon, the only material on the surface is the coarse to ever finely crushed rock derived from whatever type of bedrock is in the vicinity, sprinkled with the detritus of larger local and regional impact activities.
One of the fears was that the lander would simply sink.
I was thinking DE. You don’t want to inhale those little glass shards.
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