NASA’s Mars rover ‘Perseverance’, which began exploration on Mars in February last year, is equipped with an oxygen-producing MOXIE. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech
A research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack Observatory succeeded in making oxygen from abundant carbon dioxide on Mars, and it was published in the August 31 issue of the international scientific journal ‘Science Advances’.
NASA’s lunar rover ‘Perseverance’, which arrived on Mars in February last year, carries an oxygen production experimental device, MOXIE, made by a research team at the MIT Haystack Observatory. This is to test whether the astronauts can become self-sufficient in the oxygen they need in future manned Mars exploration missions.
Moxy converted Mars’ atmosphere stably and efficiently into pure oxygen. Air pollutants were filtered out through a filter, and carbon dioxide was separated into oxygen ions and carbon monoxide by electrolysis in a solid oxide electrolyzer (SOXE). When two oxygen ions combine to form oxygen, the production and purity are measured and released together with carbon monoxide gas.
Through seven experiments conducted by the end of last year, including the first in which NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced in April last year that it had succeeded in producing regarding 5 grams of oxygen on Mars, it is said that Moxi can produce 6 grams of oxygen per hour. fact has been proven
Oxygen production experiments were conducted under various atmospheric conditions, including day and night on Mars. Jeff Hoffman, research director at MIT’s Haystack Lab, said: “The density of the atmosphere on Mars can more than double in one year, and the temperature difference is as large as 100 degrees. It shows that there is.”
As Moxi’s performance is proven, the team plans to experiment with increasing oxygen production in the spring of Mars, where atmospheric density and carbon dioxide are high. “We’re going to raise all the standards and run the experiment as long as possible,” said Michael Heckt, chief researcher on the Moxy mission at MIT’s Haystack Observatory.
We plan to continuously check for signs of wear and tear on the mock equipment. In addition to Moxi, other experimental equipment is installed in Perseverance, so it is difficult to conduct only oxygen generation experiments in reality. However, the research team will repeatedly turn the equipment on and off as if conducting an experiment to check whether a problem occurs.
The research team revealed a blueprint for scaling up so that it can continuously produce as much oxygen as hundreds of trees can produce before the manned Mars mission. The current version of Moxy mounted on Perseverance is a toast-sized piece of equipment that is only capable of being used during missions. If you want to run an oxygen plant on Mars in earnest, you’ll need a bigger device.
“This is the first result that proves that we can actually use the resources of other planets (not Earth),” said Heckt.
MOXIE was developed by the Haystack Research Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech
