Lunar Carbon?

John Creighton · 2005-10-13 10:40:24

I know generally the moon has no carbon and the solar wind deposits very little carbon. The moon, however does have a lot of impact craters. I am wondering if any of those crater are impacts from a C-type asteroid. Would any of the carbon be left behind after the impact? What form would it be in? At what concentrations would the carbon be in? I suspect there would be very low concentrations of diamonds. Perhaps not gem quality, perhaps not in concentrations great enough for any mining process. I am not actually sure what it would be useful for as the amount of carbon needed on the moon will probably be much greater then found in these impact craters. However, for what it is worth, it should be there.

SpaceNut · 2005-10-13 10:47:15

By that thought process if you were to look at the earth you would say other than for the air there are not many surface deposits of carbon either. Most likely the surface carbon is burned off quickly just after it is deposited by the solar winds.
But under the surface has yet to be explored and may yield coal or other forms of carbon. The earth moon system was not as it always is today and may still yield a surprise or two in the future.

GCNRevenger · 2005-10-13 12:27:13

Since "coal" is left over from crushed biological material, we won't find any on the Moon.

There might be some C-type asteroids, which are loosely packed chunks of pencil lead mostly, but it might be hard to find big enough pieces to collect. We should certainly look though.

Grypd · 2005-10-13 14:08:27

C type asteroids certainly have collided with the Moon. A lot of them actually.

Will they have survived in easily accessable forms-not likely C type asteroids are thought to be a lot weaker than Iron or stony irons. We believe that some stony irons and M class will survive but it is too much to ask that a C type will.

Still the likehood is that some carbon will have survived in craters and this we can use.

GCNRevenger · 2005-10-13 14:51:04

Graphite has a vanishingly low vapor pressure though, so if it were protected from the solar wind by dust or crater, it should still be there.

Grypd · 2005-10-13 15:00:29

Graphite pounded in the ground in a very hot enviroment is not likely to stay as graphite. maybe in the future we can sell genuine Moon Diamonds.

probably by a girl called Lucy

GCNRevenger · 2005-10-13 15:05:58

Trouble is, that diamonds aren't really forever. Their sp3 type carbon is higher in energy then the sp2 type of graphite, and will eventually convert back to lumps of graphite.

Grypd · 2005-10-13 17:04:22

but hopefully by then they will have been covered by loose regolith. But if we really think about it carbon that survives reasonably intact from an impact is more than likely to have been embedded deep into the regolith. There it should be protected.

GCNRevenger · 2005-10-13 18:40:49

Or it might just have splatterd into dust when it hit the ground and is spread over an area.

All diamonds will, unless kept under extreme pressure/temperature, revert back to carbon spontainiously.

RobS · 2005-10-13 23:36:50

Certainly, plenty of C asteroids have collided with the moon, but they have mostly disintegrated into itsy bitsy pieces. I wouldn't be surprised if we find ejecta layers that are some percent carbonaceous fragments. Possibly a centrifuge could separate them based on their lower density. There are also some carbon-rich asteroids that have a fair amount of nickel and platinum group metals. Possibly carbon will be a byproduct of some PGM production.

-- RobS

GCNRevenger · 2005-10-14 06:46:40

Carbon monoxide will be a nessesarry reagent in a PGM refining process, if the Mond carbonyl process is used to seperate the PGMs from the non-valuble base metals. Most of the carbon monoxide can be recycled, but you'd still need quite a bit to replenish gas losses.

If you want to harvest carbon black from Lunar soil that is at least several percent concentration, perhaps it could be cooked in the presence of cheap, plentiful oxygen to yeild it as carbon dioxide/monoxide and captured that way. I don't think a centrifuge works all that well for solids, particularly without as much gravity.

SpaceNut · 2005-10-14 09:35:25

Some Moon facts:
Crust composition
Phosphorus 500 ppm
Carbon 100 ppm
Nitrogen 100 ppm
Hydrogen 50 ppm
Helium 20 ppm

Atmospheric characteristics
Helium 25%
Neon 25%
Hydrogen 23%
Argon 20%

trace
Methane
Ammonia
Carbon dioxide

Martian Republic · 2005-10-14 09:43:44

>>>I don't think a centrifuge works all that well for solids, particularly without as much gravity.<<<

I understand solid part of that statement and that separating solids don't work good with something solid. But, what does gravity have to do with this process. Centrifuge is where you spins something very fast to generate artificial gravity to separate something. The same number of turns on the Moon should generate the same centrifugal force it does on the Earth.

But, I don't challenge you over all assumption when it comes to separating it though.

Larry,

GCNRevenger · 2005-10-14 09:47:58

I'm thinking of the kind of centrifuge used to make ground meat or something, where the mixed material is compressed against the inside of a spinning drum, and the less dense material settles to the top of the drum and the more dense to the bottom. Is there another configuration that might work?

John Creighton · 2005-10-14 10:17:40

I'm thinking of the kind of centrifuge used to make ground meat or something, where the mixed material is compressed against the inside of a spinning drum, and the less dense material settles to the top of the drum and the more dense to the bottom. Is there another configuration that might work?

The denser material would settle at the outside walls and the less dense material will settle in the middle. All that is needed is a way to bleed off material from either the outside walls or the middle after the sediment has reached equilibrium. With soil I think it should vibrate as well as spin to help the soil flow better. I think it would also need to be crushed into a power first.

John Creighton · 2005-10-14 10:25:28

Some Moon facts:
Crust composition
Phosphorus 500 ppm
Carbon 100 ppm
Nitrogen 100 ppm
Hydrogen 50 ppm
Helium 20 ppm
Atmospheric characteristics
Helium 25%
Neon 25%
Hydrogen 23%
Argon 20%
trace
Methane
Ammonia
Carbon dioxide

That isn’t as small a concentration of carbon as I thought the moon had. I recall a previous thread where errorist suggested using lunar carbon to build a space elevator and GCNReveneger went on about the futility of it. I might look for the thread in a sec. 100 ppm is 0.01%. Or if we had a method of perfect extraction we would need to process 10 000 pounds of dirt of every pound of carbon. I think the only close to perfect separation is plasma separation and it requires extreme amounts of energy. So it is not really practical to use carbon from just anywhere on the crust. We need to find areas where it is in higher concentration. I am curious though how deep in the crust can you go before those percentages change.

Grypd · 2005-10-14 10:40:07

That isn’t as small a concentration of carbon as I thought the moon had. I recall a previous thread where errorist suggested using lunar carbon to build a space elevator and GCNReveneger went on about the futility of it. I might look for the thread in a sec. 100 ppm is 0.01%. Or if we had a method of perfect extraction we would need to process 10 000 pounds of dirt of every pound of carbon. I think the only close to perfect separation is plasma separation and it requires extreme amounts of energy. So it is not really practical to use carbon from just anywhere on the crust. We need to find areas where it is in higher concentration. I am curious though how deep in the crust can you go before those percentages change.

The regolith that covers the Moon is for the upper 5 to 12 inches a loose easily moved surface. After that regolith changes to become highly compacted and very hard to work. I wonder if we will find large areas of carbon that has been deposited by impacts under this loose regolith. Also at what level will we find this carbon. Would piping hot oxygen into the regolith be enough to collect carbon monoxide and can we collect it.

John Creighton · 2005-10-14 10:59:03

That isn’t as small a concentration of carbon as I thought the moon had. I recall a previous thread where errorist suggested using lunar carbon to build a space elevator and GCNReveneger went on about the futility of it. I might look for the thread in a sec. 100 ppm is 0.01%. Or if we had a method of perfect extraction we would need to process 10 000 pounds of dirt of every pound of carbon. I think the only close to perfect separation is plasma separation and it requires extreme amounts of energy. So it is not really practical to use carbon from just anywhere on the crust. We need to find areas where it is in higher concentration. I am curious though how deep in the crust can you go before those percentages change.
The regolith that covers the Moon is for the upper 5 to 12 inches a loose easily moved surface. After that regolith changes to become highly compacted and very hard to work. I wonder if we will find large areas of carbon that has been deposited by impacts under this loose regolith. Also at what level will we find this carbon. Would piping hot oxygen into the regolith be enough to collect carbon monoxide and can we collect it.

It seems strange to do work to get oxygen out of the crust only to pump it back in. However, I could see something like this working. But what we do is apply a lot of heat oxygen and pressure to the lunar soil to try to get the carbon into a gas state. Then separate the gasses based on what temperatures and pressures they liquefy at. It would certainly be energy intensive.

I’m thinking there must be a better way. But I can’t really see one because if we extract the metals first from the soil we may want the carbon from the soil in the metals anyway for better mechanical properties. Also it could be that once the carbon is in the mettles the only way to get it out is with oxygen which would partly reverse the process used to create the metals in the first place. Thus I don’t think we will have higher concentrations of carbon in the left over material that results from producing lunar metals then we started with in the lunar soil.

SpaceNut · 2005-10-14 11:08:25

PART 2 - Beneficiation and Extraction of Nonterrestrial Materials

Reduction of lunar ilmenite with hydrogen imported from Earth was judged to be an oxygen extraction option that could be implemented in the near term. Ilmenite, an iron and titanium oxide, is the most abundant oxide in the samples that have been brought back from the Moon.
Working for Lockheed Corporation at the Johnson Space Center. I reported the successful concentration of ilmenite in an Apollo 11 soil sample, using an electrostatic separator based on a commercial design and operated both in nitrogen and in a vacuum. This was the first research reported on the industrial behavior of actual lunar material. Additional research is needed to determine the characteristics of a system that could operate on the Moon.

Either the servers are gone though budget cuts of from the huricane quite possibly but there were once a few links on the (http://lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/spaceres) perhaps Life science but they are not active now.

Electromagnetic Isotope Separator ?

John Creighton · 2005-10-14 11:26:30

PART 2 - Beneficiation and Extraction of Nonterrestrial Materials
Reduction of lunar ilmenite with hydrogen imported from Earth was judged to be an oxygen extraction option that could be implemented in the near term. Ilmenite, an iron and titanium oxide, is the most abundant oxide in the samples that have been brought back from the Moon.
Working for Lockheed Corporation at the Johnson Space Center. I reported the successful concentration of ilmenite in an Apollo 11 soil sample, using an electrostatic separator based on a commercial design and operated both in nitrogen and in a vacuum. This was the first research reported on the industrial behavior of actual lunar material. Additional research is needed to determine the characteristics of a system that could operate on the Moon.
Either the servers are gone though budget cuts of from the huricane quite possibly but there were once a few links on the (http://lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/spaceres) perhaps Life science but they are not active now.
Electromagnetic Isotope Separator ?

Clearly they would use electrolysis on the water produced to extract the oxygen and then apply then apply then apply the hydrogen again to new sample of Ilmenite to extract more oxygen. I wonder how much hydrogen they would lose each time this procedure was done.

GCNRevenger · 2005-10-14 12:54:25

What ever happend to just blasting the stuff with microwaves or focused sunlight?

Energy is cheap on the Moon, Hydrogen is not.

John Creighton · 2005-10-14 13:57:57

What ever happend to just blasting the stuff with microwaves or focused sunlight?
Energy is cheap on the Moon, Hydrogen is not.

Can we work out any of the economics of lunar mining options? Lets start with the cost to launch a nuclear power plant to the moon, the power output the plant would have, how much power the various methods of extracting oxygen would have and what is required for external inputs (i.e. hydrogen).

Martian Republic · 2005-10-14 20:08:17

What ever happend to just blasting the stuff with microwaves or focused sunlight?
Energy is cheap on the Moon, Hydrogen is not.
Can we work out any of the economics of lunar mining options? Lets start with the cost to launch a nuclear power plant to the moon, the power output the plant would have, how much power the various methods of extracting oxygen would have and what is required for external inputs (i.e. hydrogen).

Once we figure out what we need, then we need to build an entire complex and not leave something out or what we doing is virtuously useless to us. It would be like building a city but, leaving out the schools, road, water & sewer system, power lines generator and gas lines. We may have a nice looking city, but it is useless to us. Having a bunch of individual pieces is useless to us without being able to pull it into a working system.

Larry,

Austin Stanley · 2005-10-15 03:19:13

What ever happend to just blasting the stuff with microwaves or focused sunlight?
Energy is cheap on the Moon, Hydrogen is not.

I haven't looked to far into the process, but it may be quite difficult to liberate the oxygen from the Moon's minerals through simple heating alone. Obviously if you apply enough energy it will eventualy decompose, but we could be talking about ALOT of energy here. The lattice energy of FeO is nearly ~4MJ/mol. Applying so much energy directly may not be practicle, so reducing the oxides with hydrogen makes sense. The operation is perhapce more complicated, and you do have to import the hydrogen, but it can be recycled. I'm not sure which option is actualy perferable, but more research has been put into reducing the soild with hydrogen than simple decomposition.

edit --
I guess you could electrolise the molten rocks as well, but this would take not only alot of heat energy, but also a considerabl amount of electrical energy. But on the plus side you would get pure iron in addition to then oxygen.

noosfractal · 2005-10-15 22:35:51

Extraction of volatiles. Lunar soil heated to 1300 K releases 0.1% by weight of the following trapped volatiles: CO, CO2, N2, H2, H2O, SO2, H2S, CH4, and inert gases (He, Ar, Ne, Kr, Xe). As much as 0.5-1.5% by weight may be released upon heating to 1700 K (Phinney et al., 1977).

This is from NASA's 1980 Advanced Automation for Space Missions study, which proposes self-replicating robot factories for Luna development.

http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASMIndex.html

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#1 2005-10-13 10:40:24

Re: Lunar Carbon?

#2 2005-10-13 10:47:15

Re: Lunar Carbon?

#3 2005-10-13 12:27:13

Re: Lunar Carbon?

#4 2005-10-13 14:08:27

Re: Lunar Carbon?

#5 2005-10-13 14:51:04

Re: Lunar Carbon?

#6 2005-10-13 15:00:29

Re: Lunar Carbon?

#7 2005-10-13 15:05:58

Re: Lunar Carbon?

#8 2005-10-13 17:04:22

Re: Lunar Carbon?

#9 2005-10-13 18:40:49

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#10 2005-10-13 23:36:50

Re: Lunar Carbon?

#11 2005-10-14 06:46:40

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#12 2005-10-14 09:35:25

Re: Lunar Carbon?

#13 2005-10-14 09:43:44

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#14 2005-10-14 09:47:58

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#15 2005-10-14 10:17:40

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#16 2005-10-14 10:25:28

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#17 2005-10-14 10:40:07

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#18 2005-10-14 10:59:03

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#19 2005-10-14 11:08:25

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#20 2005-10-14 11:26:30

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#21 2005-10-14 12:54:25

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#22 2005-10-14 13:57:57

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#23 2005-10-14 20:08:17

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#24 2005-10-15 03:19:13

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#25 2005-10-15 22:35:51

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