Re:Four Mars missions are launching next year
by wtracy on Tuesday June 11, 2019 @04:59PM
(#20159488)
I didn't know about the ISRU test on Mars 2020, that's very exciting!
Re:Four Mars missions are launching next year
by LeifCarrotson on Tuesday June 11, 2019 @06:01PM
(#20159908)
I thought the typical Martian ISRU called for heating soil to extract water vapor and using the hydrogen in that to make fuel. Oxygen is still interesting, for sure, but that robotic mining sounds a lot more difficult.
You'd have to use a completely different type of ISRU for the Moon, and mining for it on the Moon (i.e. scraping a permanently shadowed crater near a lunar pole) is a lot harder than on Mars where you can just suck in some of the atmosphere. There's not nearly as much commonality as you might think.