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How to make oxygen on the moon

Engineers are working on systems that can turn lunar regolith into useful elements like oxygen.

The box-like machine was now ingesting small quantities of a dusty regolith – a mixture of dust and sharp grit with a chemical composition mimicking real lunar soil. “It could save billions of dollars from mission costs,” says Mr White as he explains that the alternative – bringing lots of oxygen and spare metal to the moon from Earth – would be arduous and expensive. Along with colleagues, Palak Patel, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came up with an experimental molten regolith electrolysis system, for extracting oxygen and metal from the lunar soil.

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