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Discovery #discoveries · USA/NASA February 27, 2026

NASA Just Made Moonlight into Breathable Air

Published about 23 hours ago
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NASA's SpaceX Crew-5 in space station mockups
NASA / James Blair - NASA - JSC

NASA Just Made Moonlight into Breathable Air

The News

NASA's Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) project has cleared a critical hurdle: successfully extracting oxygen from simulated lunar regolith using nothing but concentrated sunlight. The integrated prototype test, conducted aboard the International Space Station, confirmed that solar-driven chemistry can produce carbon monoxide from lunar soil—the essential first step toward generating breathable air for astronauts living on the Moon.

This isn't theoretical anymore. It's hardware that works.

Why This Matters Right Now

The challenge facing long-duration lunar missions is brutally simple: you can't ship enough oxygen from Earth. Resupply missions are expensive, infrequent, and add massive weight to launch vehicles. For NASA's Artemis program to establish a sustainable lunar base—a cornerstone of the Moon-to-Mars architecture—the agency needs to generate life support resources on-site rather than hauling them across 240,000 miles of vacuum.

CaRD solves this by turning lunar geology into life support. The Moon's regolith, the pulverized rock covering its surface, is approximately 45% oxygen by mass, locked inside silicate minerals. The catch: extracting it requires intense heat. CaRD uses a solar concentrator—essentially a sophisticated mirror array—to focus sunlight into a reactor hot enough to drive carbothermal reduction, the same chemistry used on Earth to refine metals from ore.

The Technical Achievement

The CaRD prototype integrates four major components: a carbothermal oxygen production reactor built by Sierra Space, a solar concentrator designed by NASA Glenn Research Center, precision mirrors from Composite Mirror Applications, and avionics and gas analysis systems from Kennedy Space Center. Johnson Space Center pulled the systems engineering together.

During testing, they confirmed production of carbon monoxide (CO) from the regolith simulant—proof that the concept works in controlled conditions. The real power lies downstream: when CO is converted into O₂ using additional chemical processes already in development, the system could produce a steady oxygen supply for habitat life support, fuel cell operations, or even metallurgical processes.

Why carbothermal reduction specifically? It's proven industrial chemistry, scalable, and—critically—it requires no chemical inputs that aren't already abundant on the Moon. Sunlight is the only external resource needed.

What Comes Next

The immediate path forward involves coupling this oxygen extraction with conversion technology to turn CO into usable O₂. Beyond the lunar south pole, NASA is already eyeing how to adapt CaRD for Mars, where the technology could extract oxygen from Martian regolith or even convert atmospheric CO₂ into propellant. The cost and logistics savings are staggering: reducing payload mass for human missions, decreasing launch frequency, and enabling crews to live off the land rather than Earth's supply chain.

CaRD was funded by NASA's Game Changing Development program under the Space Technology Mission Directorate—signaling this is no longer moonshot research, but mainstream development. As Artemis missions ramp up in the coming years, technologies like this transition from "demonstration" to "flight hardware."

The Moon just became a lot more hospitable.

💡
Think of it like...

Lunar regolith is about 45% oxygen by mass—imagine if the dirt beneath your feet was nearly half pure air. A single cubic meter of lunar soil could theoretically produce enough oxygen to support an astronaut for several hours.

Related Entities

NASA·agency
Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD)·vehicle
Sierra Space·company
NASA Glenn Research Center·facility
Composite Mirror Applications·company
NASA Kennedy Space Center·facility
NASA Johnson Space Center·facility
International Space Station (ISS)·vehicle
Matthew Williams·person
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Space Weather4 days ago

China's Storm Alert System Just Prevented a Blackout Nightmare

A Superstorm Hits, and China's New Monitoring Network Proves Its Worth In May 2024, a geomagnetic superstorm slammed Earth's magnetosphere with the force of a space-based haymaker. Thanks to China's newly operational Chinese Meridian Project (CMP)—a ground-based monitoring network that tracks magnetic field fluctuations in real time—scientists got their first detailed look at what a modern superstorm can do to power infrastructure on the Chinese mainland. The results are sobering: the 2024 event exceeded the infamous November 2004 storm and matched the severity of the catastrophic March 1989 blackout that left six million Canadians without power. What made this storm particularly dangerous wasn't just its strength—it was how fast it changed. The horizontal component of Earth's magnetic field swung between −449 and −720 nanoTeslas at different CMP stations, with rate-of-change measurements hitting 60 nanoTeslas per minute. That's like someone yanking a magnetic blanket off the planet in slow motion. These rapid shifts are what truly threaten power grids, because transformers and long-distance transmission lines act like antennas, harvesting energy from the changing field whether operators want them to or not. The Vulnerability: One Substation, One Target Using sophisticated geomagnetically induced current (GIC) modeling, researchers mapped how currents flowed through the Eastern Inner Mongolia Power Grid. The analysis revealed a critical weak point: the Tianjin South substation operating at 1,000 kilovolts absorbed a peak induced current of 168.5 amperes—enough to degrade transformer insulation, trigger protective relays, and potentially cascade into a regional blackout. Here's where the CMP's real-time monitoring becomes indispensable. The team measured actual GICs at two substations and compared them to their model predictions. The agreement was striking—both timing and amplitude matched closely. This validation means the network can now forecast grid vulnerability during an active storm, giving operators precious minutes to shed load, isolate transformers, or bring backup systems online before catastrophic failure. Why This Matters Now Space weather risk has shifted from theoretical to existential for modern economies. A Carrington Event-scale storm today would cost the global economy roughly $2 trillion in the first year alone, according to insurance and economic analyses. China's CMP, combined with its proven GIC modeling capability, represents a critical piece of infrastructure resilience that most nations still lack. The implications extend beyond China. This research demonstrates that continuous geomagnetic monitoring paired with grid-specific vulnerability modeling can transform passive adaptation into active defense. It's the difference between hoping a storm doesn't hit your weakest point and knowing where that point is and defending it in advance. What's Next: Racing Against the Solar Cycle We're climbing toward the peak of Solar Cycle 25, expected around 2025-2026. That means more superstorms are coming. The CMP data from May 2024 will serve as a benchmark for the international space weather community—a detailed record of what a severe storm looks like when observed from multiple ground stations with precise instrumentation. Other nations are already taking notes. Japan, South Korea, and European operators are studying whether similar networks could protect their own grids. China's next priority: integrating real-time GIC monitoring into automatic grid management systems. Imagine a smart grid that throttles consumption and reroutes power flows the instant a geomagnetic storm kicks in, all without human intervention. That's the future the CMP is building toward—and it's arriving faster than most of us realize.

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