Wednesday, March 27

China discovers a new mineral and a new fuel… on the Moon


Our satellite, that piece of rock that rotates around us and that gives us light at night -in addition to being in charge of the tides-, could be the home of a new material. Or so they believe in China, where they claim to have discovered something on their last mission.

The decade we are in, the 20s, will be remembered for the decade in which space exploration gave the starting signal that so many generations were waiting for. Returning to the Moon, by the Artemis program; pointing to Mars, with SpaceX in the lead; And so we could go on for a while.

Today we focus on China’s Chang’E-5 robotic lunar mission, which has discovered more than just water on the lunar surface. Scientists have confirmed the discovery of a new mineral, a transparent crystal called Cambiite (Y), and a possible fusion fuel.

In a joint announcement by the China National Space Administration and the China Atomic Energy Authority last week, China celebrated its first new mineral discovered on the Moon, and the sixth ever discovered by mankind.

According to the Chinese news agency Global Times, “Cambiite (Y) is a kind of transparent and colorless columnar crystalThe mineral was discovered from an analysis of lunar basalt particles by a research team from the Beijing Uranium Geology Research Institute.

The analyzed sample, confirmed by the International Mineralogical Association as a new mineral, was found among just 1,731 grams of lunar samples returned by the Chang’E 5 mission in 2020, the first moon rocks to be brought back to Earth since 1976.

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This transport has also provided the first figures on the concentration of helium-3 in lunar dust.and the researchers have managed to deduce the “extraction parameters” needed to collect this isotope from the returned samples.

Helium-3 is considered a promising potential fuel for nuclear fusion. With two protons and a single neutron, it is the only known stable isotope of any element that has more protons than neutrons.

In theory, a deuterium/helium-3 fusion reaction would release 164.3 megawatt hours of energy for every gram of helium-3. And, above all, neither helium-3 nor its reaction products are radioactive, so that is a huge advantage.

But there are drawbacks: a helium-3 fusion reactor would have to operate at much higher temperatures than a tritium reactor, for example, and helium-3 is extremely rare and difficult to isolate on Earth.

In fact, the main way to produce it today is to wait for the tritium in nuclear warheads and related stockpiles to decomposeto later extract it in small quantities, which add up to about 15 kg per year.

Land

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Despite how difficult it would be to exploit this fuel, the extraction of lunar helium is an idea that China plans to explore, according to specialized media.

Following the Changesite-(Y) and Helium-3 announcements, the China National Space Administration announced full state approval of the next three phase 4 lunar missions.

The Chang’E 6, 7 and 8 missions, scheduled to launch in 2024, they will explore the lunar south pole and begin building a basic structure for the International Lunar Research Station.

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