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Many of the tools are designed as experimental steps toward 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 payload on space missions. It takes up a lot of room, and it's very unlikely that astronauts could bring enough of it to Mars for humans to breathe there, let alone to fuel spaceships for the long journey home.
That's the problem MOXIE is looking to solve. The car-battery-sized robot is a roughly 1 percent scale model of the device scientists hope to one day send to Mars, perhaps in the 2030s.
Like a tree, MOXIE works by taking in carbon dioxide, though it's designed specifically for the thin Martian atmosphere. It then electrochemically splits the molecules into oxygen and carbon monoxide, and combines the oxygen molecules into O2.
It analyses 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 scaled-up devices, however, would store the oxygen produced in tanks for eventual use by humans and rockets.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/moxie-robot-nasa-mars-rover-turns-co2-into-oxygen-2020-7
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Monday August 10 2020, @04:42PM (5 children)
Terraforming Mars would be cool. What would that even look like though? Given, that we could actually convert all of the atmosphere to breathable air, is that what it would equate to? Just the fact that you could walk outside and not be dead in short order? I mean that would be great, but then, you've still got a giant ball of dust and maybe some ice. Which isn't what one would think of when you think of Sci-Fi terraforming. You think, green grass, flowing water, an atmosphere that replenishes itself, etc. Then, doing that on a planet scale? Yeah, that seems bonkers. You'd likely be able to create massive facilities with tons of redundancy that would be feasible from modern standards. Comparatively, it's like expecting an SR-71 Blackbird from the Wright brothers. Sure, they got something to fly, but there's a whole lot of incremental steps to get to something that they didn't even comprehend. While people may have thought how awesome it would be to be able to fly many centuries ago, being able to travel thousands of times faster than a bird, likely wasn't even something they speculated on.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @04:47PM (3 children)
I dunno. That alien one used in Total Recall (the first one--I never saw the remake) worked pretty darn fast. You could take your helmet off and not have your head explode only minutes after turning it on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:07PM
I see. Let’s send a bunch of holywood people to mars and see what happens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @07:44PM (1 child)
Yeah,... and how can you be sure that it's not a fake memory somebody planted in your brain?
(Score: 4, Touché) by PartTimeZombie on Monday August 10 2020, @09:06PM
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @08:21PM
We'd still be at 1% of the earth's atmospheric pressure levels. So we'll need to find some ice or breathable rocks to vaporize as well.