The aerospace technology company Sierra Space has announced a historic milestone in space exploration, successfully completing a test of its Technology to obtain oxygen on the Moon. His Carboreduction Oxygen Production Reactor has carried out The first automatic extraction of oxygen from simulated regolith and in an environment similar to that of our satellite. Regolith is the material formed by dust and rock fragments on the surface of the Moon. This reactor is a system autonomous and automated designed to take advantage of it and produce oxygen in large quantitiesso that the most ambitious objectives of the program can be realized Artemis from NASA.
‘The Apollo program took us to the Moon to study and learn. Artemis takes us back to the Moon, This time to stay. Our company is focused on building the infrastructure necessary to enable continued human presence on the lunar surface. This sustainable future begins with developing the basic technology and systems that create oxygen in that environment, using local natural resources‘, he says Tom ViceCEO of Sierra Space, in a statement.
Last August, Sierra Space engineers worked with simulated lunar soil for two weeks, in a thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Johnson Space CenterThis allowed the system to recognize the environment as similar to the Moon’s south polar region, rich in frozen water.
The Sierra Space reactor carried out all the procedures for handling the regolith and the carbon reduction reaction, which releases oxygen from minerals in the simulated regolithin a vacuum environment and under extreme conditions, with temperatures that fluctuated between minus 45ºC and 1,800ºC.
In addition to the difficulties of operating in that temperature range, the system also needed transport regolith. By using a patent-pending valve design that has been proven to operate for over 10,000 cycles, Sierra Space was able to seal the gases inside the reactor and manage potentially harmful particles with mechanics.
The tests verified that Sierra Space’s reactor is capable of handling regolith, delivered by a robotic arm or lunar roverand automatically transport it to the reaction chamber. There, the system can carry out the carbon reduction reaction process, extract oxygen from the minerals in the regolith and remove the processed regolith so that the process can be repeated.
‘With our innovative technology that can provide a reliable source of oxygen on siteSierra Space is poised to play a potential role in NASA’s Artemis program and other initiatives aimed at establish a permanent human presence on the lunar surface‘, Vice notes.
According to the company, the successful test confirms that Sierra Space’s oxygen extraction technologies and techniques are effective and could work on the lunar surface.
‘These efforts confirmed that hardware has advanced to the Technology Readiness Level Six (TRL-6)which means that it has matured enough to be incorporated into a flight mission to the Moon as a technology demonstrator‘, he assures Shawn Buckleyvice president of Space Destination Systems at Sierra Space.
This reactor, however, is not Sierra Space’s only contribution to NASA’s Artemis program that will take humans back to the Moon. The company is collaborating with Teledyne and Nissan in the design of a lunar surface vehicle and is also developing Expandable habitats made of Vectrana polyester created from liquid crystal polymer, which is intended to protect astronauts from radiation and small meteorites on the Moon.