SUMMARY: Researcher Dr. Mike Duke has been working for several years to create a rover that could use lunar dust to create propellant for use by future explorers. Over the course of four years, Duke and his team have created a robotic excavator that can scoop up soil. In the future, this excavator could deliver the soil to a Moon-based extraction system that would process the soil to draw out hydrogen. In a future scenario, propellant created on the Moon could be launched back into space to refill spacecraft relatively inexpensively.

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This might work on Europa, but I thought the moon was relatively hydrogen-free [except inside the polar craters].

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Hmm, I was thinking they were talking about mining He3 not Hydrogen.

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The polar crator hydrogen is believed to be water ice, but the chemistry of the soil contains plenty of hydrogen locked up in the dirt and rocks. There is Oxygen, Calcium, Titanium, and Aluminum in large quantities in the soil and rocks, too. All of them could be used to make, fuel, breathable air, water, and the structures to house and protect scientists, engineers, and astronomers working on the surface. With the materials available on the Moon we should be able to build huge radio telescopes in crators, large mirror optical telescopes capable of working in all light ranges (Earth's atmosphere block several key bands requiring orbiting telescopes now), and vast fields of solar arrays to collect the enregy of the sun and beam it as microwaves back to Earth for free and unlimited power.

And Helium3 (2 protons and 1 nuetron), which is abundant on the Moon but not Earth, is another resource to mine while there. Our current fusion research works with Dueterium (1 proton and 1 nuetron) and Tritium (1 proton and two nuetrons), isotopes of Hydrogen (1 proton only), to try to create energy. Unfortunately, the farther you are from a full Helium atom (2 protons and 2 nuetrons) the more energy it takes to initiate fusion. Fusing four Hydrogen atoms takes the most energy input, and although using Dueterium or Tritium, with their extra nuetrons, does reduce the energy input required to start the fusion process, Helium3 would allow fusion with the lowest possible energy input. If we can get it in appreciable quantities then we could jumpstart fusion energy production on Earth, which has been stuck at 50 years off in the future for the last 50 years.

Thats amazing it sounds very futeristic.