Researchers with the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators from the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Nanjing University, and Harbin Institute of Technology, have conducted experiments on the Moon’s soil (regolith) that shows that water can be extracted from it. They used a small amount of the 1,731 grams (a little over 3 lbs) of material from the Moon that was brought back by the Chang’e-5 probe, which returned to Earth on December 17, 2020. They published their results in the journal, The Innovation, on August 22, 2024 (the issue with a September 9 cover date).
Xinhua noted: “They found that the solar wind has irradiated the minerals in lunar soil for billions of years and stored abundant hydrogen. When heated to high temperatures, the hydrogen reacts with the iron oxides in the minerals to form elemental iron and large amounts of water. When the temperature rises above 1,000° Celsius, the lunar soil melts, and the water generated by this reaction is released as vapor. The researchers confirmed that 1 g of molten lunar regolith can generate 51-76 mg of water. ‘In other words, 1 tonne of lunar regolith can produce more than 50 kg of water, which can meet the daily drinking water needs of 50 people per day,’ said Wang Junqiang, a professor at the NIMTE.”
