helium3

Over billions of years, the surface of the Moon has been bombarded by solar wind, carrying high-energy particles that include a highly coveted resource, helium-3. Although the element is scarce on Earth, it has recently become in demand by several industries, including those working on quantum computing and nuclear fusion reactors.Moon Knight Gives Us HopeHelium-3 has been deemed so precious that one company is willing to go all the way to the Moon to get it. Seattle-based startup Interlune recently announced that it…

A budding startup called Interlune is trying to become the first private company to mine the moon’s natural resources and sell them back on Earth. Interlune will initially focus on helium-3 — a helium isotope created by the sun through the process of fusion — which is abundant on the moon. In an interview with Ars Technica, Rob Meyerson, one of Interlune’s founders and former Blue Origin president, said the company hopes to fly its harvester with one of the upcoming commercial moon missions backed by NASA. The plan is to…

Two of Blue Origin's earliest employees, former president Rob Meyerson and chief architect Gary Lai, have started a company that seeks to extract helium-3 from the lunar surface, return it to Earth, and sell it for applications here.The company has been operating in stealth since its founding in 2022, but it emerged on Wednesday by announcing it has raised $15 million, adding to previous rounds of angel investments.This is a notable announcement because, while the funding is small, the implications are potentially large.…

Two-phase simulation of He partitioning at core-mantle boundary conditions. (a) A snapshot at 47520 fs of two-phase coexistence simulations of Mg64O64He4 solid and Fe96He4 liquid at 4000 K and ~135 GPa. (b) The corresponding instantaneous coarse-grained density profile (blue dots) along the z-axis of the simulation box and the best fitting curve using Eq. 2. The two dashed lines (z0 and z1 in Eq. 2) are the locations of Gibbs dividing surfaces. The red…