(9) and additions of silica will generally increase the viscosity of most silicate glasses. CHEMICAL SEPARATION OF LUNAR SOIL Extraction of Water In all discussion of lunar resources, one of the recurring questions is the availability of water. If adequate supplies of water can be obtained locally and need not be brought from Earth, many of the problems in mineral beneficiation and chemical processing would be minimized. Even more important, perhaps, the logistics of maintaining a lunar base would be greatly simplified. Supplies of water, along with carbon dioxide, would permit the production of food and oxygen.t The lunar soils tThe possibility that useful amounts of H2O and CO2 were present in fluid inclusions in lunar minerals, as they are found in most terrestrial minerals, was the major reason for my original involvement in the lunar sample program. If H2O and CO2 were present, a simple heating by solar radiation could decrepitate the inclusions and free the gases. Unfortunately, the lunar samples were found to be devoid of such inclusions.
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