NASA’s perseverance Mars rover launched at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 30, featuring state-of-the-art technology including high definition video equipment and the first interplanetary helicopter.
Many of the tools are designed as experimental steps towards human exploration of the red planet. Crucially, Perseverance is equipped with a device called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE: an attempt to produce oxygen on a planet where it makes up less than 0.2 percent of the atmosphere.
Oxygen is a cumbersome loadload on space missions. It takes up a lot of space, and it’s highly unlikely that astronauts could bring enough of it to Mars for humans to breathe there, let alone thank spaceships for the long journey home.
That is the problem that MOXIE seeks to solve. The robot with car battery is a roughly 1 percent scale model of the device that scientists hope to send to Mars one day, perhaps in the 2030s.
Like a tree, MOXIE works by absorbing carbon dioxide, although it is specifically designed for the thin Martian atmosphere. It then breaks down the molecules into oxygen and carbon monoxide, and combines the oxygen molecules into O2.
It analyzes the O2 for purity, shooting for about 99.6 percent O2. Then it releases both the breathable oxygen and the carbon monoxide back into the planet’s atmosphere. Future upscale devices would, however, produce the oxygen in tanks for eventual use by humans and rockets.
A distribution of the components within the MOXIE oxygen generator. (NASA / Wikimedia Commons)
The toxicity of the carbon monoxide produced is not a concern, according to Michael Hecht, a lead researcher for MOXIE. The gas restores the Martingale atmosphere, but will not change it completely.
“If you release the carbon monoxide into the Martian atmosphere, it will eventually combine with a very small amount of residual oxygen that is there and turn back into carbon dioxide,” Hecht previously told Business Insider.
For that reason, the carbon monoxide would also not hinder a potential biosphere on Mars – a closed, engineered environment where terrestrial life can flourish.
Because MOXIE is a small experiment-or-concept experiment, it will not produce much oxygen – if all goes well, it would need to produce about 10 grams per hour, which is roughly the amount of oxygen in 1.2 cubic feet of ground air. For context, humans need about 19 cubic feet of air per day.
MOXIE will test its capabilities by producing oxygen in steps of one hour intermittent throughout the entire period of the mission of Perseverance, according to NASA. The device would soon start working after the rover landed on February 18, 2021.
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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