Preparing a mission for outer space is a little bit like getting ready to go camping.
If you don't pack enough provisions for the whole trip, it's going to be tough to make it back home.
But geologist Leslie Gertsch is hoping to change all that. She's starting a lab at Missouri University of Science and Technology this summer that will test space rocks for gases—if she finds enough gas, there could be a future for rocket gas stations in space.
“If you can stop at a gas station, a gas asteroid, it would make [space travel] more efficient,” Gertsch says. “You wouldn't have to carry all your fuel.”
What's the magic gas ingredient inside the space rocks?
Gertsch will have to bake the meteorites to find out exactly what kinds of gases they give off, and how much, but research suggests some of the rocks have as much as 22 percent water in them, and gases like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, or carbon monoxide, that could all be processed to fill up the tank in space.
To process the fuel, the rocks would need to be bagged and baked. The hot gases coming off the meteorites, trapped inside the bag, could be sent to space refineries, or siphoned directly into fuel tanks designed to be meteorite-gas-compatible.
We won't know for sure how much gas is inside the meteorites, or how much is easily extractable, until the lab's first testing results come out in 2016.
Gertsch says if this year's tests are a success, the technology could be online as early as 2030, just in time for your new home on Mars to have its own neighborhood meteorite 7-Eleven.
