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NASA’s Perseverance rover is equipped with a device to convert Martian air into oxygen which, if produced on a larger scale, could be used not only for breathing, but also as fuel.
One of the hardest things about sending astronauts to Mars will be getting them home. Launching a rocket off the surface of the Red Planet will require industrial amounts of oxygen, a crucial part of the thruster: a crew of four would need about 55,000 pounds (25 metric tons) of it to produce thrust. of 15,000 pounds (7 metric tons). rocket fuel.
That’s a lot of propellant. But instead of shipping all that oxygen, what if the crew could get away with thin (Martian) air? A first-generation oxygen generator aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover will test the technology to do just that.
The Mars Oxygen Resource In Situ Use Experiment, or MOXIE, is an experimental instrument that differs from the primary science of Perseverance. One of the rover’s primary goals is to capture returned rock samples that might bear signs of ancient microbial life. While Perseverance has a suite of instruments designed to help achieve this goal, MOXIE focuses only on the engineering required for future human exploration efforts.
Since the dawn of the space age, researchers have talked about the use of in situ resources, or ISRUs. Think of it as living off the land and using what is available in the local environment. This includes things like finding water ice that could be melted for use or shelter in caves, but also generating oxygen for rocket fuel and, of course, breathing.
Breathing is only a secondary benefit of MOXIE’s real goal, said Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the instrument’s principal investigator. The rocket thruster is the heaviest consumable resource astronauts will ever need, so being able to produce oxygen at their destination would make the first crewed trip to Mars easier, safer, and cheaper.
“What people usually ask me is if MOXIE is being developed so that astronauts have something to breathe,” Hecht said. “But rockets breathe hundreds of times more oxygen than humans.”
Making oxygen requires heat
The atmosphere of Mars poses a major challenge to human life and rocket thruster production. It is only 1% of the thickness of the Earth’s atmosphere and 95% of carbon dioxide.
MOXIE sucks this air in with a pump, then uses an electrochemical process to separate two atoms of oxygen from each molecule of carbon dioxide, or CO2. As the gases circulate through the system, they are analyzed to verify the amount of oxygen produced, its degree of purity, and the efficiency of system operation. All gases are released into the atmosphere after each experiment.
Powering this electrochemical conversion requires a lot of heat – about 1470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius). Due to these high temperatures, MOXIE, which is a bit larger than a toaster, features a variety of heat tolerant materials. Special 3D printed nickel alloy parts help distribute heat inside the instrument, while an ultra-light insulation called airgel minimizes the power required to keep it at operating temperatures. The exterior of the MOXIE is covered with a thin layer of gold, which is an excellent reflector of infrared heat and prevents those blazing temperatures from radiating into other parts of Perseverance.
“MOXIE is designed to produce about 6 to 10 grams of oxygen per hour – just enough for a small dog to breathe,” said Asad Aboobaker, MOXIE systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “A large-scale system designed to manufacture (a thruster for the return flight) would need to increase oxygen production by about 200 times what MOXIE will create.”
Future Martians
Hecht estimates that a full-scale MOXIE system on Mars could be a little larger than a home stove and weigh around 2,000 pounds (1,000 kilograms) – almost as much as Perseverance itself. Work is underway to develop a prototype in the near future.
The team plans to run MOXIE about 10 times in a year on Mars (two Earth years), which will allow them to see how well it works in different seasons. The results will inform the design of future oxygen generators.
“The commitment to develop MOXIE shows that NASA is serious about it,” Hecht said. “MOXIE isn’t the complete answer, but it’s a critical part of it. If successful, it will show that future astronauts can rely on this technology to help them return safely from Mars.”
Learn more about the mission
A key focus of Perseverance’s mission to Mars is astrobiology, including looking for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and hide Martian rock and regolith (broken rocks and dust).
Subsequent missions, currently being considered by NASA in cooperation with ESA (the European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples on the surface and send them back to Earth for further analysis.
The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon in preparation for human exploration of the Red Planet. Tasked with bringing astronauts back to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration plans.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages the operations of the Perseverance rover.
To learn more about perseverance:
mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
nasa.gov/perseverance
Media contacts
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-393-2433
[email protected]
Alana Johnson / Gray Gravestone
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-672-4780 / 202-358-0668
[email protected] / [email protected]
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