In-situ Resource Utilization

ISRU sounds like science fiction, and for the moment it largely is. This concept involves identifying, extracting and processing material from the lunar surface and interior and converting it into something useful: oxygen for breathing, electricity, construction materials and even rocket fuel Many countries have expressed a renewed desire to go back to the Moon. NASA has a multitude of plans to do so, China landed a rover on the lunar farside in January and has an active rover there right now, and numerous other countries have their sights set on lunar missions. The necessity of using materials already present on the Moon becomes more pressing.Anticipation of lunar living is driving engineering and experimental work to determine how to efficiently use lunar materials to support human exploration. For example, the European Space Agency is planning to land a spacecraft at the lunar South Pole in 2022 to drill beneath the surface in search of water ice and other chemicals. This craft will feature a research instrument designed to obtain water from the lunar soil or regolith.There have even been discussions of eventually mining and shipping back to Earth the helium-3 locked in the lunar regolith. Helium-3 (a non-radioactive isotope of helium) could be used as fuel for fusion reactors to produce vast amounts of energy at very low environmental cost – although fusion as a power source has not yet been demonstrated, and the volume of extractable helium-3 is unknown. Nonetheless, even as the true costs and benefits of lunar ISRU remain to be seen, there is little reason to think that the considerable current interest in mining the Moon won’t continue.It’s worth noting that the Moon may not be a particularly suitable destination for mining other valuable metals such as gold, platinum or rare earth elements . This is because of the process of differentiation, in which relatively heavy materials sink and lighter materials rise when a planetary body is partially or almost fully molten.This is basically what goes on if you shake a test tube filled with sand and water. At first, everything is mixed together, but then the sand eventually separates from the liquid and sinks to the bottom of the tube. And just as for Earth, most of the Moon’s inventory of heavy and valuable metals are likely deep in the mantle or even the core, where they’re essentially impossible to access. Indeed, it’s because minor bodies such as asteroids generally don’t undergo differentiation that they’re such promising targets for mineral exploration and extraction