The Space Agency will receive fuel for Martian ground rocket

The main problem associated with sending humans on Mars is the presence of enough fuel for the return trip. A team of NASA engineers claims to have developed a technology capable of solving this problem.

If the cyclical history of humanity?

In the new work, posted on the IEEE Spectrum online portal, the head of NASA's engineering team, Kurt Lekht, said that the space agency was employing them to develop solutions that would allow future missions to Mars, and settlers – to get Sol Martian fuel.

The Lekht team is called In situ Resource Utilization or ISRU, but the engineer prefers the name push dust to the factory ("push dust recycling plant").

The idea is that the ISRU will extract water from the regolith (what is called the unusual red soil on Mars, which, as scientists think, contains traces of water) and, with the help of the electrolysis, splits it into hydrogen and oxygen.

Demonstration of ISRU systems in simulated mission / © NASA / YouTube

The system will then combine hydrogen and carbon from the atmosphere of the red planet to create methane, which can be used as fuel for rocket.

NASA plans to send the ISRU system to Mars before a human mission on the planet. There, the system will collect the Martian soil with robots, which will go there for further examination. A few years later, the red planet will have to go people. They will stay there for a while and then use the fuel produced by the system for their return flight to Earth.

"This technology will allow us one day to live and work on Mars, then return to Earth and tell its story," Lekht writes.