Moon mining a step closer with new lunar soil simulant

Australian Mining 20 February, 2013 By Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation

Australian researchers have developed a substance that looks and behaves like soil from the moon’s surface and can be mixed with polymers to create ‘lunar concrete’, a finding that may help advance plans to construct safe landing pads and mines on the moon.

Valuable rare earth minerals, hydrogen, oxygen, platinum and the non-radioactive nuclear fusion fuel Helium-3 (He-3) are abundant on the moon. NASA and other space agencies have shown interest in lunar mining but the US is yet to ratify a 1984 treaty that would strictly regulate moon resource extraction.

However, even if moon mining was allowed, lunar conditions are so different to Earthly conditions that new machinery may have to be invented to develop resources found there.

Furthermore, the cost of transporting materials made on Earth would be prohibitive, forcing scientists to come up with ways to build certain equipment using material only found on the moon’s surface.

A research team led by Dr Leonhard Bernold, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of New South Wales, has created a new lunar soil simulant that closely resembles samples brought back by the Apollo astronauts.

Dr Bernold said such a simulant is essential to test lunar mining systems on Earth and may help researchers develop ways to create a waterless concrete using lunar dust, a component of the moon surface material known as regolith.

“We now know a lot about the mechanical properties of the regolith on the moon so we can create something that simulates it. We have tried to match it as close as we can,” said Dr Bernold.
Dr Bernold’s lunar soil simulant is made up primarily of very fine basalt particles taken from a quarry in Kulnura on the NSW Central Coast.

“These particles are a byproduct of crushing the basalt to serve aggregates for making concrete or asphalt, but are too tiny to be useful and have to be thrown away,” said Dr Bernold.

“On the moon, those small particles are abundant, having being created by small meteorites hitting the lunar surface at high speed over millions of years, thus breaking larger stones down into tiny particles.

As well as providing a substance on which Earthly mining techniques can be tested, the simulant soil can also be mixed with polymers to create a lunar concrete, said Dr Bernold.

“So, for example, we can find ways to create an in-situ resource utilisation material to build a landing pad for rockets on the moon. When rockets are landing, they blow away fine soil and it’s like a sandblaster blasting everything around,” he said, adding that a proper landing pad on the moon would reduce the dangerous sandblaster effect.

“Everything we ship from Earth will cost a lot of money, so we want to do as much as we can from the material that’s available there on the moon in abundance.”
Dr Bernold, who said NASA had shown interest in his findings, is presenting his simulant this week at the Off Earth Mining Forum hosted by UNSW.

Professor Andrew Dempster, Director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research (ACSER) at the University of New South Wales said a lunar soil simulant would help researchers better understand the properties of moon dust.
“The main value in this work is to do with the soils on the moon being so different to the type of soil on the earth and the type of soil most mining machinery is dealing with,” he said.

International treaties and special space laws would be needed to work out who had ownership rights to material mined from the moon, said Dr Dempster.

“I understand there’s an environmental argument around it too but if you were to mine the moon or an asteroid or other planets, there’s not going to be the environmental impact that local mining would have on the local biosphere. It’s a way of mining such that the mining process itself doesn’t produce any negative environmental impact,” he said.

“Obviously, however, you need to produce a lot of energy to go and do it.”

Students working with Dr Bernold are studying methods for harvesting and storing solar heat energy on the moon in a ‘lunar battery’ using materials found on the moon.

 This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

21 FEB 2013, 6:56 PM   -   SOURCE: ANDY PARK, SBS

Experts from NASA met with Australian mining engineers today, to take further what is now no longer science fiction: Off-Earth mining.
 
A confluence of international mining experts, space engineers and robotics specialists are at the Australian Centre for Space Engineering to talk about a subject that even a month ago would have been considered science fiction - tapping the rich resources on offer in outer space.

Just days' ago the Mars Curiosity Rover drilled into the surface of Mars, a string of space entrepreneurs and investors plan to be mining asteroids by 2016 and NASA wants to prospect on the moon the year after.

These specialists are at the University of New South Wales to connect their unique clusters of highly specialised fields, and to try to leverage Australia’s mining knowledge for a space race that is shifting into warp overdrive.

“I’m here because we are very interested in what Australia is doing in different sectors, both in mining because of their expertise and their innovation [in] space technologies,” says Laurent Sibille, NASA’s visiting off-earth mining specialist.

Far from a pipe dream, he says that space mining is a flourishing sector for entrepreneurial innovation.

“Prospecting on the moon is already underway - I’m part of a project at NASA called the RESOLVE project to send a payload in 2017 to a shaded crater on the moon to verify and qualify the existence of ice water on the moon.”

But a pattern is emerging where private space exploration tends to seek market potential back on earth, while government space agencies like his tend to seek resources that may extend or sustain space exploration and research.

“The concept of using space resources came from the fact that we realised there’s no way to sustain missions very far into space without giving them the capability to use what they have around them.”

“If you give that probe, if you give that robot or that crew the ability to harness the resources, minerals or resources gasses, atmosphere and them make something out of it, to save themselves, to repairs something, or to increase their capability, you change everything.”

But the question remains over what resources might be available.

“Ice would be a prime commodity and it would available right away, among the minerals you have resources that are meant to be used in space so that would be iron, aluminium, titanium, calcium, silicon, platinum, group metals, copper or rare earth metals might be potentially of interest for off-earth and on-earth markets,” he said.

MINING AUSTRALIA’S KNOWLEDGE
US space contractor Kris Zacny from Honeybee Robotics developed the rock abrasion tool that sits at the end of the arm on the Mars Exploration Rover which drilled into Mars earlier this month.

He is standing in UNSW’s giant 360 degree mine simulator, effectively a virtual mine.

It takes complex modelling like topography and ore deposit mapping and then projects a navigable mine visualisation, complete with mine trucks, on a huge circle of curved walls.

“Australia is known for mining, the visualisation that we see behind us is just one of the examples that can be adapted to space exploration," he said.

"We can use this for mine planning on Mars or the moon, you can use the technology that we developed here and [then] spin them off into space exploration and this is one of the countries that have unique capabilities that we should leverage for mining in space.”

Robotics expert with UNSW, Dr Gordon Roseler, say one opportunity is in providing the robotics for off-earth missions, similar to the mine automation technologies already deployed in some mining  operations in Australia.

“We won’t get there without it, in other words, robots are the only way to get there that is affordable and safe,” Dr Roseler said.

“[If] you recognise that this is just in its infancy, so if you strike out fast, if Australia throws itself at this, it could really be a key player.”

Another Australian innovation is Associate Professor Lenoard Bernold's moon dust simulant, providing an environment on earth, to model potential mining technologies on the moon.

"This is effectively a playground for emerging technologies to test mining techniques," he said.

BUT WHO OWNS THE MOON?
The only relavent ownership precedent concerning the moon is the 1967 treaty, which also covers Antarctica and forbids mining for commercial gain there.

Although there are claims on it, soverignties don't exercise their territorial claims over Antarctica.

“It’s like no one owns Antarctica, you can go there and set up laboratory but no one owns the land. The same is true for the moon and Mars,” Mr Zacny said.

Laurent Sibille says he’s concerned that there’s no established protocol on how to establish ownership in space.
“These issues will have to be address very quickly, possibly by the United Nations or super nation bodies like that, because space entrepreneurs are not going to wait,” he said.

But Mr Zacny says that there’s room for everyone in the vast expanses of space.

“Space is humongous. There’s space enough for everyone to explore,” he said.

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To read more and watch videos, click http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1739332/Space:-the-mining-frontier