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How will future astronauts get home to Earth from March? They could make rocket fuel from the methane already on the Red Planet, according to a new study.
Researchers have come up with a new way to create methane-based rocket fuel that they hope could make return travel from Mars much more feasible. This method has already been theorized by Elon Musk and SpaceX engineers who considered ways to use carbon dioxide and ice water on mars to have the carbon and hydrogen needed to create methane.
So, in theory, future astronauts could use this technique to transform local Martian materials like ice and carbon dioxide. make rocket fuel for a return home. This new method is only a “proof of concept” for the moment, which means that it has only been tested in the laboratory, but not under real conditions.
Yet although “a lot of engineering and research is needed before this can be fully implemented,” Huolin Xin, a physicist at the University of California at Irvine who led the research said in a press release. “But the results are very promising.”
Related: How living on Mars could challenge future astronauts (infographic)
To create this new method, the team used an existing two-step method to transform water into breathable oxygen on the International space station and made it a one-step process. They did this using a single atom zinc catalyst.
“Zinc is basically a great catalyst,” Xin said in the statement. “It has time, selectivity and portability – a big plus for space travel.”
By reducing a two-step process to one step, it makes the mechanism more compact and portable, and therefore easier to transport for use on Mars, the statement said.
This new method takes atomically dispersed zinc, which acts as a catalyst for the reaction, helping to create methane from carbon dioxide. The process, using this specialized catalyst, “efficiently converts CO2 into methane,” Xin said.
Many launchers these days do not use methane-based rocket fuel, so this process should be compatible with future propulsion technologies. But methane-based fuel could have a number of advantages over liquid hydrogen used by companies like Boeing and Lockheed. Liquid hydrogen leaves carbon residue in rocket engines that need to be cleaned up, which would be difficult (not simply impossible) to accomplish on Mars, according to the same statement.
However, some companies are already going on board to develop and use methane-based rocket fuel. For example, SpaceX Starship’s Raptor engines, Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine, and Firefly Alpha all work to use methane-based fuel.
Email Chelsea Gohd at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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