"All you have to do is vaporize the stuff," said Eric Cardiff of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who leads one of several teams developing ways to provide astronauts with the oxygen they will need on the Moon and Mars, and points in between.

Lunar soil is rich in oxides, the most common of which is silicon dioxide, or SiO2, "like beach sand," Cardiff said. Also plentiful are oxides of calcium (CaO), iron (FeO) and magnesium (MgO).

Cardiff's team is working on a technique that heats lunar soil until it releases oxygen.

"It's a simple aspect of chemistry," he explained. "Any material crumbles into atoms if made hot enough." The technique is called vacuum pyrolysis.

"A number of factors make pyrolysis more attractive than other techniques," Cardiff said. "It requires no raw materials to be brought from Earth, and you don't have to prospect for a particular mineral."

As proof of principle, Cardiff and colleagues used a lens to focus sunlight into a tiny vacuum chamber and heated 10 grams of simulated lunar soil to about 2,500 degrees Celsius (4,500 degrees Fahrenheit).

Test samples included ilmenite and Minnesota Lunar Simulant, or MLS-1a. Ilmenite is an iron/titanium ore that Earth and the Moon have in common. MLS-1a is made from billion-year-old basalt found on the north shore of Lake Superior and mixed with glass particles that simulate the composition of the lunar soil.

Actual lunar soil is considered too precious to consume for such research.

In their tests, "as much as 20 percent of the simulated soil was converted to free oxygen," Cardiff said. The leftover is called slag, a low-oxygen, highly metallic, often glassy material.

Cardiff and colleagues at NASA's Langley Research Center are attempting to figure out how to shape slag into useful products such as radiation shielding, bricks, spare parts or even pavement.

"In May, we're going to run tests at lower temperatures with harder vacuums," he said. In a hard vacuum, oxygen can be extracted with lower power. Cardiff's first test was at 1/1,000 Torr, or 760,000 times thinner than sea level pressure on Earth (760 Torr).

At 1 millionth Torr - another thousand times thinner - "the temperatures required are significantly reduced," he said.

NASA and the Florida Space Research Institute, through NASA's Centennial Challenge, are sponsoring MoonROx, the Moon Regolith Oxygen competition. The agency will award a $250,000 prize to the team that can extract 5 kilograms of breathable oxygen from simulated moon dust in just eight hours. The competition closes June 1.

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