MMM Classics Year 10: MMM #s 91-100 - Moon Society

ABORIGINAL AND STILL ONGOING
PRODUCTION OF GLASS
FROM MOON DUST
by Peter Kokh
Foreword - “Natural Production” on Earth
“Manufacturing” is increasingly a strange word, for
literally, it means “made by hand”. Yet more and more the
involvement of human hands is reduced to pushing buttons,
sometimes just on a keyboard. But behind the “manu” is still
the “mente”, the mind. In that sense, we can hardly speak of
Nature manufacturing anything. Yet “natural production” of
many useful things does occur, and the historical foundations
of human economies are rooted very deeply in these natural
productions, as opposed to purely human manufacturing. It is
very much as if human industry relies on recipes using “not
quite from scratch, prepared ingredients”. All you fellow
bachelor chefs know of what I speak.
Our terrestrial economy owes a great debt to the
natural production of sand and gravel, marble, granite, slate,
and veins of concentrated metal ores. These handy prepared
materials have been naturally produced through the eons by
geological processes. And of course, where would we be
without those biologically assisted geological processes that
have resulted in the natural production, and warehousing, of
limestone, chalk, coal, oil, gas, shale, and other fossil derivatives?
“Natural Production” - if you will not admit “Natural
Manufacturing” - has given our species an enormous handicap,
without which, for all our pretentious brainpower, we might
still be in the caves or in the forests.
“Natural Production” on the Moon
On the Moon, these particular natural productions
have not occurred. Luna is geologically dead, and has been for
a long time. That said, Nature is still very much alive on the
Moon, and busy, in a way we are sure to find very helpful.
Our outpost construction efforts, at least long term,
stand to gain from the natural production of craters, rilles, and
lavatubes. When it comes to future production of building
materials and processing in general, while the chemical and
mineral assets of the Moon would seem very homogenized in
comparison to those of Earth, there has been some helpful
beneficiation and enrichment. Highland soils are richer in
aluminum, magnesium, and calcium. Mare soils are richer in
iron and titanium. The splashout from the Mare Imbrium
impact event is enriched in the so-called KREEP deposits:
potassium, rare earth elements, and phosphorous.
More, we suspect the as yet unsampled central peaks
of large craters represent upthrusts of deep mantle material;
and that may prove a useful starting point in the production of
some useful chemical elements. Finally, we have hope that
some of the crater impacts were caused by asteroids rich in
elements otherwise scarce on the Moon - like that which
caused the Sudbury, Ontario astrobleme, source of much of the
world’s nickel and copper.
Regolith 1.03
1.00 Nor does the list of prepared lunar assets stop
there. Incessant meteorite bombardment through the eons has
pulverized the surface to a depth of several meters (yards ±)
forming a powdery blanket called the “regolith”. Because this
material is representative of the host lunar endowment, it is a
handily “pre-mined” source of most everything we will want to
process on the Moon. Thanks to the natural production of the
regolith, we won’t be “strip mining” the Moon.
1.01 One of the special handy features of the regolith
is the presence of a considerable amount of pure “iron fines”,
unoxidized (non-rusted) iron particles. Some years ago, Seattle
LUnar Group Studies (SLUGS) determined that if you excavate
a site (for the placement of a soil-shielded habitat), you will
find in the material removed, enough pure iron particles from
which to build the habitat to be placed in the excavation. This
resource can be recovered for the price of a simple magnet.
[MMM # 63 MAR ‘93 “Sintered Iron from Powder”].
1.02 Another special enhanced feature of the regolith
is a considerable bounty of adsorbed solar wind gases [MMM
# 23 MAR ‘89 pp 4-5 “Gas Scavenging”; MMM # 38 SEP ‘90
p 4 “Introductory Concepts of Regolith Primage”], thanks to
eons of buffeting of the surface by the Solar Wind, blowing
outward from the Sun’s surface. Involved are considerable
amounts of hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, garden variety helium,
helium-3, neon, argon, and krypton, all recoverable through the
application of a little concentrated solar heat.
1.03 Nor is that all. A third natural production within
the regolith has been going on - again for billions of years. The
natural production of glass spherules from the heat of micrometeorite
impacts.
Impact-derived Glass Spherules
SOURCE: Planetary Science: A Lunar Perspective. Stuart
Ross Taylor. Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, and
Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National
University, Canberra. © 1982
Glass: [Random House Dict.] [1] a hard, brittle, noncrystalline,
more or less transparent substance, produced by
fusion, usually consisting of mutually dissolved silica and
silicates ... [2] or other ... natural substances with similar
properties such as fused borax, obsidian, etc.
[Physically, glass is considered to be an extremely viscous
liquid. Thus glass is markedly different from both crystalline
and ceramic materials. Transparency or translucency,
while common, are not automatic nor essential characters.]
Impact-derived lunar glasses are commonly found as
spheres, the rotational shapes assumed by splashed liquids,
ranging widely in size. 100 microns [m] in diameter is typical
(i.e. about a hundredth of a centimeter or 4 thousandths of an
inch). [p. 128] Interestingly enough, this size/shape range are
what we find on Earth for algal and bacterial one-celled microfossils,
though the composition is totally different [p. 134].
The spherules are often flattened owing to the degree
of plasticity at the time they “landed”. Broken pieces are
common as are irregular masses coating larger particles in
blotches. The spherules are themselves commonly “cratered”
by even smaller micrometeorite impacts than those that led to
their formation. Colors range from colorless through pale
yellow, green, brown, orange to red, and black, and show a
clear relation to refractive index and to chemical composition
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 60