A new study has revealed that a tool aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen on Mars at the same rate as a small tree on Earth. The CO2-rich planet has been around since February 2021, when Perseverance first landed on Mars.
According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, a new study published in the journal Science Advances shows that MOXIE is able to produce oxygen in a variety of weather conditions, including during the day and night, and during the different seasons of Mars.
Also, in each of the seven trial cycles, the tool reached its goal of producing six grams of oxygen per hour, roughly the same rate as a humble tree on Earth.
The researchers assert that an expanded version of MOXIE might be sent to Mars before a human mission, to continuously produce oxygen at a rate of several hundred trees. At this capacity, the system must generate enough oxygen to support humans once they arrive, and fuel the rocket to bring the astronauts back to Earth.
Harvesting and using a planet’s materials such as carbon dioxide to produce oxygen or other resources that would otherwise be transported is known as “in situ resource utilization”.
MOXIE Deputy Principal Investigator Professor Jeffrey Hoffman, of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, said: “This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body, and chemically converting them into something that will be useful for a human mission.”
The current version of MOXIE is also small in design, to suit persistence, and has been designed for short durations, starting and shutting down with each run, depending on the probe’s exploration schedule and mission responsibilities. Consistently perfect.
Despite the necessary compromises in the current design, the instrument has shown that it can reliably and efficiently convert the Martian atmosphere into pure oxygen, doing so by first drawing Martian air through a filter that cleans it of pollutants.
