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-Z- (z@gundam.com)
Tue, 7 Nov 2000 20:15:26 -0800
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-gundam@1u.aeug.org [mailto:owner-gundam@1u.aeug.org]On
> Behalf Of Zhou Tai An
> Sent: Monday, November 06, 2000 21:13
> To: gundam@aeug.org
> Subject: Re: [gundam] Jupiter Energy Fleet and Minovsky Particles
>
> >* First Gundam: Newtype candidate Challia Bull is transferred from Zeon's
> >energy fleet to its military branch, the first of many Jupiter newtypes.
>
> I prefer Sharia Bull.
For what it's worth, Gichi Ohtsuka, author of For The Barrel, has him down as
Shalia Bull, one of the Original Four.
> Actually, another question - it's said that large amounts of helium-3 can be
> found in the Moon's soil, left there by the solar wind, so why isn't the
> Moon a highly-contested location?
As Gerald Kulcinski of the University of Wisconsin has noted, the lunar surface
contains a trace amount of helium-3. Kulcinski has argued that the solar wind
has implanted great quantities of hydrogen and helium into the lunar regolith.
The concentration of helium-3 is highest in mature regolith and, within the
regolith, highest in the mineral ilmenite. Lunar ilmenite is an iron titanite,
containing only ferrous iron, titanium, and oxygen in the proportions FeTiO3 and
would be a key material in lunar colonization in any case, as it would yield
both building materials (iron and titanium) and oxygen.
The concentration of helium-3 in the regolith is actually astonishingly small,
about one ton of helium-3 for every hundred megatons of regolith, but the total
amount on the Moon appears sufficient to power Earth for several centuries. On
Earth, the largest accessible source of helium-3 is from the decay of tritium in
hydrogen bombs. To extract it would require melting down every warhead on
Earth, an act that's appealing for other reasons, but even this would yield only
a third of a ton of helium-3, about enough for a single day of power generation
in the US alone. The lunar helium-3 scheme exists in several versions, but they
all involve shipping heavy equipment to the Moon to dig the regolith, crush the
agglutinates, beneficiate the ilmenite, sieve the ilmenite to enrich the
smallest grains, and heat those grains to release the trace of solar-wind gasses
in them. These gasses are dominated by hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, and
normal helium-4. Of this complex gas mixture, then, only 0.01% (0.1 per mille)
is helium-3.
These gasses must be seoarated to get a pure helium extract, then the helium
isotopes must be separated by clever low-temperature (near absolute zero)
processing. Compare this to diving into the Jovian atmosphere with a ramscoop.
The topmost layer is a cloud of crystals of solid ammonia at a temperature of
126?K (-233?F = -147?C = 227?R). The part of the atmosphere that we can see,
near the cloud tops, is mostly hydrogen and helium gas with a fraction of a
percent of methane and ammonia, some neon and argon, and traces of acetylene and
hydrogen cyanide produced by the ultraviolet reduction of methane and ammonia.
Helium is abundant and the probably yield of helium-3 will be on the close order
of ten tons per megaton or about a thousand-fold that of lunar regolith -- and
it'll already be at a temperature that makes separation easy.
A better harvesting technique might be to drop balloons into the upper
atmosphere and inflate them and haul them back up. The big problem here is
Jupiter's enormous gravity well. The best place in the Solar system to "mine"
helium-3 may actually be Uranus, which has a Jovian type atmosphere but is only
14.4 times the mass of Earth, compared to Jupiter's 318.
-Z-
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