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NASA’s Perseverance rover carries a device to convert Martian air into oxygen which, if produced on a larger scale, could be used not only for breathing, but for fuel as well.
One of the hardest things about sending astronauts to Mars will be getting them home. Launching a rocket from the surface of the Red Planet will require industrial quantities of oxygen, a crucial part of the propellant: a crew of four would need approximately 55,000 pounds (25 metric tons) to produce thrust from 15,000 pounds (7 metric tons) of rocket fuel.
That’s a lot of propellant. But instead of carrying all that oxygen, what if the crew managed to get him out of the thin (Martian) air? A first-generation oxygen generator aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover will test the technology to do exactly that.
The Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, is an experimental tool that stands out from the primary science of Perseverance. One of the rover’s primary purposes is to capture returnable rock samples that could bear signs of ancient microbial life. Although Perseverance has a suite of tools designed to help achieve this, MOXIE focuses solely on the engineering needed for future human exploration efforts.
Since the dawn of the space age, researchers have talked about in situ resource utilization, or ISRU. Think of it as living off the land and using what is available in the local environment. This includes things like finding ice water that could be melted for use or sheltering in caves, but also generating oxygen for rocket fuel and, of course, breathing.
Breathing is just a side benefit of MOXIE’s true goal, said Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the instrument’s principal investigator. Rocket propellant is the heaviest consumable resource astronauts will need, so being able to produce oxygen at their destination would make their first manned trip to Mars easier, safer, and cheaper.
“What people typically ask me is whether the MOXIE was developed so that astronauts have something to breathe,” Hecht said. “But rockets breathe hundreds of times more oxygen than people.”
The production of oxygen requires heat
The atmosphere of Mars represents a major challenge for human life and the production of rocket propellants. It is only 1% thicker than the earth’s atmosphere and is 95% carbon dioxide.
MOXIE sucks in that air with a pump, then uses an electrochemical process to separate two oxygen atoms from each carbon dioxide or CO2 molecule. As the gases flow through the system, they are analyzed to see how much oxygen has been produced, how pure it is and how efficient the system is running. All gases are released back into the atmosphere after each experiment is performed.
Powering this electrochemical conversion takes a lot of heat – around 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius). Due to these high temperatures, MOXIE, which is a little larger than a toaster, features a variety of heat-resistant materials. Special 3D printed nickel alloy parts help distribute heat inside the instrument, while super-light insulation called airgel minimizes the power required to keep it at operating temperatures. The exterior of MOXIE is coated with a thin layer of gold, which is an excellent infrared heat reflector and prevents those scalding temperatures from radiating to other parts of Perseverance.
“MOXIE is designed to produce 6 to 10 grams of oxygen per hour, enough for a small dog to breathe,” said Asad Aboobaker, a MOXIE systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “A full-size system geared towards producing (propellant for the return flight) would need to increase oxygen production by about 200 times what MOXIE will create.”
The future Martians
Hecht estimates that a large-scale MOXIE system on Mars could be a little larger than a domestic stove and weigh around 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), almost as much as Perseverance itself. Work is underway to develop a prototype for one in the near future.
The team plans to run MOXIE about 10 times over the course of a Martian year (two Earth years), allowing them to see how well it works in different seasons. The results will inform the design of future oxygen generators.
“The development efforts of MOXIE show that NASA is serious about this,” Hecht said. “MOXIE is not the complete answer, but it is a crucial piece. If successful, it will demonstrate that future astronauts can rely on this technology to help them return home safely from Mars.”
Learn more about the mission
A key focus for Perseverance’s mission to Mars is astrobiology, including the search 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 store Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent missions, currently under consideration by NASA in collaboration with ESA (the European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and bring them back to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with the return of astronauts 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 operated for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, has built and operates the Perseverance rover operations.
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