It's difficult to breathe on Mars right now.
The atmospheric pressure on the surface is not as high as it could be. It would take three times the height of Mount Everest to stand on Mars and try to suck in some air.
The atmosphere of the Red Planet is mostly carbon dioxide with a small amount of nitrogen and argon. It's a losing game to try to find oxygen.
If you stand near the Perseverance rover, the odds are worse. A small experiment on the nuclear-powered lab created nearly 50 grams of sweet, sweet O 2 out of thin air. If it were at sea level, it would be 35 liters. It isn't enough to keep you alive for a long time.
We are able to make air on Mars.
The experiment is called Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization and it is a testbed to see if it is possible to use native resources to create materials for humans to work and live on Mars. To return to earth.
It is expensive to deliver materials to Mars. It takes a lot of fuel to lift a lot of supplies to Earth and it costs a lot of money. If a human wants to return to Earth when they are done at Mars, they need fuel for their rocket as well.
Sending hundreds of tons of material to Mars is something that needs to be done. It was pretty much pricey.
Unless you're able to get there. In situ manufacturing could save a lot of money and be safer.
It's a good place to start. There is just a small amount of oxygen in the atmosphere of Mars. The molecule is locked up in carbon dioxide. We don't need to do anything else.
O 2 is what MoXie does, and it's about the size of a decent toaster oven. Electricity is used to break apart a molecule. MoXie takes in the air on Mars, runs it through a HEPA filter to get rid of the fine dust that is everywhere on the planet, heats it to 800C ( 1,500F), then passes it over a nickel cathode. O 2 is made when the oxygen atoms combine with each other at the anode. The carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and argon, and unused CO 2 are wasted.
Each time MOXIE was run it created between 6 and 8 grams of oxygen.
The important thing is that it did this. It made a difference.
The entire point is that. Half the point is correct. One of the goals was to make oxygen, but the other was to test the system to see how it can be scaled up. It's nice to have a few grams per hour, but future astronauts need more than that. It will take hundreds of times more capacity for a future super-MOXIE to exist.
The results so far show that it is possible. Because the rover was the first mission available to go to Mars for the experiment, there were compromises made to the design of Moxie. They found that a bigger machine would be more efficient. A device that runs continuously and is insulated would run better and have a dedicated power source.
Oxygen is needed for other things as well. Humans working on Mars will need to come back to Earth, and one current idea is to use a rocket called a Mars Ascent Vehicle to lift them off the ground, and then another rocket to take them home. The MAV would likely use about 31 tons of oxygen and 9 tons of methane in a single launch. Orbital considerations mean a launch every 26 months or so when Mars and Earth align correctly, so that gives a schedule for how quickly a future version of MoXie would need to make oxygen.
Oxygen can be made from water ice on Mars, but it is only in certain locations and would need to be mined. It is difficult and costly. MoXie uses the air, which is everywhere.
MoXie is a small step for a machine. For anyone planning to put human bootprints in the red dust, they can now breathe a little easier.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
