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posted by martyb on Friday October 27 2017, @01:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-make-water-from-hydrazine dept.

Mars colonists could create a carbon dioxide plasma in order to supply oxygen to their settlement(s):

The atmosphere on Mars is 96 per cent carbon dioxide, says Vasco Guerra at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. This can be split to extract breathable oxygen and carbon monoxide, a fuel that could give us a "gas station on the Red Planet", he says. He and his team calculate that creating a carbon dioxide plasma — a mush of ions made by passing an electric current through a gas — could split carbon dioxide from oxygen more easily on Mars than on Earth.

The lower atmospheric pressure on Mars would allow us to create plasmas without the vacuum pumps or compressors necessary on Earth. Also, the temperature of around -60°C is just right to let the plasma more easily break one of the chemical bonds that keeps carbon and oxygen tightly bound, while preventing the carbon dioxide from re-forming.

For now, this is largely theoretical, but they say such a system needing only 150 to 200 Watts for 4 hours each 25-hour Mars day could produce 8 to 16 kilograms of oxygen. "The International Space Station currently consumes oxygen in the range of 2 to 5 kilograms per day, so this would be enough to support a small settlement," says Guerra.

The case for in situ resource utilisation for oxygen production on Mars by nonequilibrium plasmas (open, DOI: 10.1088/1361-6595) (DX)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @01:23PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @01:23PM (#588205)

    and when that CO is burnt for power it will need the O that was liberated for breathing

    It may be possible to "burn" the CO with something more readily available on Mars? Perhaps some fluorine compounds?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Tara Li on Friday October 27 2017, @01:41PM (1 child)

    by Tara Li (6248) on Friday October 27 2017, @01:41PM (#588213)

    Actually, the CO might be able to be fed into a variation of a Sabatier Process reactor (the Sabatier Process uses CO2 & hydrogen to make methane and water - CO2 + 4 H2O -> CH4 + H2O, so you'd need to switch to CO + 3H2 -> CH4 + H2O - seems doable...)

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday October 28 2017, @04:23PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday October 28 2017, @04:23PM (#588709) Journal
      Wikipedia mentions several such applications [wikipedia.org] in addition to the one you mentioned. A particularly interesting one is that it can be used to free hydrogen from water and to produce hydrocarbons via the Fischer-Tropsch process [wikipedia.org]. That allows for production of low weight hydrocarbons which can be polymerized to form basic plastics.