Four Ohio State aerospace engineering students are working toward making space stations and cheaper space travel more than just science fiction. The “Astrobucks” — seniors Rachel Neff and Richard Jedrey and juniors Elizabeth Carruthers and Michael Boehler — in April traveled to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to test a new technique for extracting oxygen from lunar soil.
“The reason this process is so interesting is that it may be possible to set up ‘gas stations’ on the moon,” Neff said. “Oxygen could be cooled and stored and then be ready for pick up. Any space mission launched from Earth could swing by the moon to pick up oxygen for its trip.”
Ever since the Hubble telescope identified oxygen-rich soil on the moon, NASA has been working toward finding a way to utilize it to make air for astronauts to breathe — even going as far as to offer a $250,000 prize for any team that could extract the oxygen from the soil within a certain period of time.
“It was great to see that our problem actually — definitely — applies to NASA, because they have a whole lab working on it,” Neff said.
The students used heated hydrogen to extract the oxygen from the soil.
“If you run heated hydrogen through … the hydrogen reacts with the oxygen in the soil and separates it from the soil, and you get water. Then you can extract the oxygen from the water,” Neff explained. The students conducted the experiments while flying aboard NASA’s C-9 aircraft. The aircraft’s flight simulated lunar gravity, which is about one-sixth of Earth’s gravity.
“The aircraft flies over the Gulf of Mexico executing parabolic maneuvers — think of a rollercoaster,” said Jack McNamara, assistant professor of aerospace engineering and faculty advisor to the team. “If you’ve ever ridden a rollercoaster, you know that your stomach drops out when you go over the top and descend quickly. This is you experiencing reduced gravity. What you experience for a split second, the students will experience for half of a minute at a time, repeated over 30 times.”
The Astrobucks will analyze the data collected from the trip over the next quarter and share the results with NASA scientists.
“It was awesome, better than we expected; we got lots of data,” Carruthers said. “From initial looks, it looks great and we’re all excited.”
Before the experiment, the team spent days physically and mentally preparing for the experience of weightlessness they would experience while flying in the C-9. They even spent some time in a hyperbaric chamber, learning to recognize the symptoms that come from a lack of oxygen to the brain.
“It really plays some tricks with your mind, but it’s a lot of fun,” Jedrey said of the disorienting effects of low oxygen.
The students collected two entire sets of data while on NASA’s C-9 aircraft, a rare thing in an environment where researchers are not used to weightlessness.
“We were switching between 1/6 G and 2G; sometimes my hand was too heavy to move, let alone type, and others it was floating…My advice is, try to avoid working on a computer if the gravity is not constant,” Neff said, grinning.
Neff recommends students get involved with research if at all possible.
“It’s been a whole lot of work,” he said, “but it’s been the experience of a lifetime.”