Madrid. The Moxie experiment, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the United States, managed to produce oxygen in the atmosphere of Mars, in what constitutes the first demonstration of the use of resources on-site on the red planet and a key step in the goal of sending humans on a Martian mission, researchers announced in the journal Science Advances.
The Resource Utilization Experiment on-site The Mars Oxygen Station (Moxie) has successfully manufactured oxygen from the carbon dioxide-rich Martian atmosphere since February 2021, when it arrived as part of the Mars mission. perseverance from NASA.
The researchers report that, as of late last year, Moxie was able to produce oxygen in seven experimental runs, in a variety of atmospheric conditions, including day and night, and across different Martian seasons. In each of the tests, the instrument met its goal of producing six grams of the element per hour, about the rate of a modest tree on Earth.
The researchers envision that an enlarged version of Moxie could be sent to Mars before a human mission, to continuously produce oxygen at the rate of several hundred trees. With that capacity, the system would generate enough to support humans once they arrive and power a rocket that returns astronauts to the blue planet.
For now, Moxie’s continued production is a promising first step toward that goal. “We’ve learned a lot that will form the basis for larger-scale systems,” said Michael Hecht, the mission’s principal investigator at MIT’s Haystack Observatory.
Oxygen production on Mars also represents the first demonstration of the “use of natural resources”. on-site”.
“This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body and chemically transforming them into something that would be useful for a human mission. It’s historic in that sense,” said Jeffrey Hoffman, Moxie’s deputy principal investigator and professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Coauthors at that institute include Moxie team members Jason SooHoo, Andrew Liu, Eric Hinterman, Maya Nasr, Shravan Hariharan, and Kyle Horn, along with collaborators from multiple institutions, including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who managed Moxie’s development, flight software, packaging, and testing prior to launch.
The current version of the instrument is small by design, to fit aboard the robot, and is built to run for short periods, starting up and shutting down with each run, depending on the exploration schedule and mission responsibilities, but a factory Large-scale oxygen supply would include larger units that, ideally, would run continuously.
Despite the necessary compromises in the device’s current design, it has shown that it can reliably and efficiently convert Mars’ atmosphere to pure oxygen. To do this, it first sucks in the Martian air through a filter that cleans it of contaminants, pressurizes it and sends it through the solid oxide electrolyser, an instrument developed and built by OxEon Energy, which electrochemically splits the air rich in carbon dioxide. into oxygen ions and carbon monoxide.
The oxygen ions are then isolated and recombined to form breathable molecular oxygen, or O2, the quantity and purity of which is measured in the Moxie before it is safely returned to the air, along with carbon monoxide and other atmospheric gases.
Since the robot’s arrival in February 2021, engineers have turned on the instrument seven times a Martian year, each time taking a few hours to warm up and then another hour to make oxygen before shutting down again. Each run was scheduled for a different time of day or night, and in different seasons, to see if it could adapt to changes in atmospheric conditions.
“The atmosphere of Mars is much more variable than that of Earth,” Hoffman said. Air density can vary by a factor of two throughout the year, and temperature by 100 degrees. We want to show that we can function in all seasons.
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