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posted by janrinok on Sunday August 03 2014, @06:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the my-children-went-to-Mars-and-all-I-got-was-this-T-shirt dept.

NASA has selected instruments for the next Mars rover, to be launched in 2020. Among the instruments is MIT's Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (or MOXIE). The recursive acronym describes an experiment to create oxygen gas from the ambient carbon dioxide of Mars' atmosphere.

The experiment, currently scheduled to launch in the summer of 2020, is a specialized reverse fuel cell whose primary function is to consume electricity in order to produce oxygen on Mars, where the atmosphere is 96 percent carbon dioxide. If proven to work on the Mars 2020 mission, a MOXIE-like system could later be used to produce oxygen on a larger scale, both for life-sustaining activities for human travelers and to provide liquid oxygen needed to burn the rocket fuel for a return trip to Earth.

"Human exploration of Mars will be a seminal event for the next generation, the same way the moon landing mission was for my generation," says Michael Hecht, principal investigator of the MOXIE instrument and assistant director for research management at the MIT Haystack Observatory. "I welcome this opportunity to move us closer to that vision."

Other instruments include advanced imaging, geological, and climate experiments that are geared toward searching for and preparing for life on Mars. In addition, there is the hope of returning rock samples directly from Mars.

Its suite of instruments is downsized compared to Curiosity, which is carrying 165lb (75kg) of scientific kit. Some of that space will be used to package up cylindrical rock samples drilled from the planet's surface.

Nasa hopes these can be shipped home by future return flights.

Being able to produce oxygen could help with that ambition, since transporting fuel is heavy and expensive. Other Nasa spacecraft can already produce oxygen from CO2 but the new "MOXIE" device will test this capability in the Martian atmosphere, for the first time.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by evilviper on Sunday August 03 2014, @06:38AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Sunday August 03 2014, @06:38AM (#76850) Homepage Journal

    Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (or MOXIE). The recursive acronym

    That's certainly NOT a recursive acronym. One of the letters would have to stand for "Moxie" for it to be recursive. The harder you try to make yourself sound smart, the dumber you look...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym [wikipedia.org]

    --
    Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday August 03 2014, @06:47AM

      by frojack (1554) on Sunday August 03 2014, @06:47AM (#76851) Journal

      he harder you try to make yourself sound smart, the dumber you look...

      I see exactly what you mean...

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 03 2014, @12:38PM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday August 03 2014, @12:38PM (#76886) Journal

      Thanks -- I was thinking "it's 5:30 am, no coffee yet, but where is the recursiveness." What I do see is apparently, an acronym inside an acronym. ISRU is probably defined somewhere I can find, but what would an acronym of acronyms be called? Later -- fish are calling.

  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Sunday August 03 2014, @07:17AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Sunday August 03 2014, @07:17AM (#76855) Homepage Journal

    a specialized reverse fuel cell whose primary function is to consume electricity in order to produce oxygen on Mars

    Wouldn't a "reverse fuel cell" just be an extremely basic water electrolysis set-up?

    an experiment to create oxygen gas from the ambient carbon dioxide of Mars' atmosphere.

    Has NASA been using some special fuel cells, that I don't know about, which produce mainly CO2 as a byproduct? Or has fuel-cell become such a buzzword that anything with a membrane is being called a fuel cell now? I might just have a fuel-cell under my sink, filtering my water...

    where the atmosphere is 96 percent carbon dioxide.

    It just so happens that I know of a device that'll take solar power, carbon dioxide, and some water, and turn it into oxygen. It's fully proven to work, has an operational lifetime in excess of a century, and costs 5¢ each. A few near the ice caps might cause some melt, and perpetually sustain themselves without our help, naturally teraforming the planet, in as far as that's possible with the lack of a magnetosphere.

    to roduce oxygen
    Nasa hopes
    Nasa spacecraft

    [sic]
    Firefox's spell-checker noticed the typos before I did...

    https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/going-red-planet

    Oh good, I really, really wanted to visit a web page with a huge floating bar across the top following me down the page, that covers 1/3rd of the screen on my wide monitor. Thankfully, Adblock can take care of it.

    Monitors have NEVER been taller than they are wide, until smartphones came along... Why do so many insist on wasting my precious vertical screen space?

    MOXIE — short for Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment

    So MOXIE is actually: MOISRUE

    Frankly, forcing acronyms to be common words, degrades the value of both. When I want to search the web for out-of-business soda companies, I hardly want to bring up a bunch of information about MIT/NASA devices. It would help if search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo would copy Clusty, and automatically generate categories for every search, to make it easy to see what a horde of unrelated nonsense you can expect to find, and narrow it down without the guess-work of free-form guessing and typing.

    Of course, Hecht and his Haystack colleagues won’t be working on MOXIE in a vacuum.

    *Badum, ching*.

    "We want to invest in a simple prototype before we are convinced. We’ve never run a factory on Mars. But this is what we’re doing; we’re running a prototype factory to see what problems we might come up against."

    That's actually a good idea, and the first time I've heard of NASA doing such on-site testing before it is needed. I suppose that's considerably more expensive than a best-guess simulation of Mars here on earth, but probably a good idea for the super-critical components, which could unexpected be affected by the lower gravity, pressure fronts, or other phenomenon we can't practically reproduce here at home.

    --
    Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 03 2014, @08:04AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 03 2014, @08:04AM (#76858)

      "Monitors have NEVER been taller than they are wide"

      ... for some non-standard meaning of NEVER.

      Xerox PARC did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 1) by evilviper on Monday August 04 2014, @02:41AM

        by evilviper (1760) on Monday August 04 2014, @02:41AM (#77065) Homepage Journal

        Internal research system, never sold commercially.

        --
        Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
    • (Score: 2) by carguy on Sunday August 03 2014, @11:21AM

      by carguy (568) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 03 2014, @11:21AM (#76872)

      > a specialized reverse fuel cell whose primary function is to consume electricity in order to produce oxygen on Mars

      I'm tempted to call BS. Anyone here able to run some quick numbers? How much energy will it take to make enough O2 to fuel a rocket. I'm thinking it's a lot, which means we'd have to land some really big solar panels...or a nuclear power plant?

    • (Score: 1) by AlHunt on Sunday August 03 2014, @10:11PM

      by AlHunt (2529) on Sunday August 03 2014, @10:11PM (#76995)

      >>When I want to search the web for out-of-business soda companies,

      The nice people at Moxie are still working hard, making great soda:
      http://www.drinkmoxie.com/ [drinkmoxie.com]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 03 2014, @01:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 03 2014, @01:10PM (#76890)

    obviously every atom is same as the next and in chemical reaction it doesn't matter what the source was.
    nevertheless : ) the first "green plant" on mars that will create oxygen from carbo-dioxide will NOT be solar powered but nuke powered.
    so in 200 years we might read on soylentnews.mars.org that scienticts have pin-pointed the first liberated thru nuke power oxygen atoms that kick-started the "terra"forming of mars.
    in other news the "normal" background radiation has again risen by 0.2 microSieverts. a increase of 0.02 to the week before ...