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posted by Fnord666 on Monday August 10 2020, @03:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the old-fashioned-chemistry dept.

Submitted via IRC for RandomFactor

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @05:01PM (15 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @05:01PM (#1034395)

    uhm ... carbon monoxide reacts with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide so if they are releasing the oxygen and carbon monoxide back into the atmosphere wouldn't it simply react with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide again?

    Or I guess they are exhausting the carbon monoxide into the atmosphere and storing the oxygen in an enclosed environment to see if life can sustain itself in such an environment? I can't imagine they plan to use the oxygen to burn hydrocarbons for fuel with ... there is an energy cost associated with converting carbon dioxide to oxygen and carbon monoxide and are they going to get all of that energy back? Plus they would still have to bring up those hydrocarbons to mars, unless they can find them at mars, which ... defeats the purpose?

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @05:15PM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @05:15PM (#1034401)

    I can't imagine they plan to use the oxygen to burn hydrocarbons for fuel with ...

    ROCKETS.

    There I filled in that one for you. You need Oxygen to burn fuel to get off the surface. We have yet to create an electric rocket that will lift anything from any planetary surface. This is unlikely to change in our lifetimes.

    The obvious question you may now have is WHY WE NEED TO LIFT OFF MARS?

    1. sample return mission
    2. if people want to leave Mars
    3. if empty rockets want to leave Mars (like the SpaceX rocket)

    If you have to bring in oxygen for this from Earth, it's fucking expensive. Even with re-usable rockets. So it's sooo much cheaper just to make your own there.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @05:35PM (10 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @05:35PM (#1034413)

      The reason why the fuels we use are convenient and useful is because of their energy density. To convert a whole lot of carbon dioxide to oxygen and carbon monoxide may require a whole lot of energy so you might have to start out with an energy dense source to begin with ... which it would probably be more efficient to simply use the energy dense source more directly in the first place instead of making all these energy costing conversions.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 10 2020, @05:58PM (6 children)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday August 10 2020, @05:58PM (#1034421) Journal

        Certain Mars rockets want methalox (methane + oxygen). You can get the energy to make that from the Sun.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:00PM (5 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:00PM (#1034423)

          but then you need hydrogen ....

          • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday August 10 2020, @06:07PM (4 children)

            by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday August 10 2020, @06:07PM (#1034426) Journal

            Water ice. There's a lot of it [wikipedia.org] on Mars, including nice accessible deposits like this one [wikipedia.org].

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            • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:18PM (3 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:18PM (#1034437)

              And lo and behold, one of the primary reactions used for industrial production of hydrogen gas here on earth is the reaction of carbon monoxide with water (the water-gas shift reaction).

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:28PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:28PM (#1034442)

                uhm ... interesting stuff. Might actually have use one day.

              • (Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday August 11 2020, @12:54AM (1 child)

                by anubi (2828) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @12:54AM (#1034649) Journal

                Let me see... Moxie takes co2, add energy (solar? Nuclear?) to make o2 and co.

                WGSR takes H2O and the co to make h plus the co2 which moxie needs.

                End result, water plus energy makes oxygen and hydrogen.

                Anybody working on hydrolysis? Or does the moxie and WSGR use a more attainable energy flow? Like heat. Or maybe use some of the WSGR heat?

                There are many ways to skin a cat. Interesting. I haven't studied the thermodynamics and chemistries of this, but other trains of thought are always welcome. These new paradigms often revolutionize our technologies.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @07:35PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @07:35PM (#1034470)

        SpaceX intends to concentrate its resources on the transportation part of the Mars colonization project, including the design of a propellant plant based on the Sabatier process that will be deployed on Mars to synthesize methane and liquid oxygen as rocket propellants from the local supply of atmospheric carbon dioxide and ground-accessible water ice.[4] from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday August 10 2020, @08:52PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 10 2020, @08:52PM (#1034520) Journal

        Yeah, they take a whole lot of energy. But the benefit of doing this on the ground is that you don't need to carry the weigh required for some of the processing steps, and can accumulate the energy slowly. (If that's not your point, see the prior reply.)

        I'm still a fan of some sort of skyhook, but realistically those are only practical when you've got a LOT of transport going up and down. And bases will need to replenish their Oxygen levels until we get a totally closed cycle ecology. (Hah! Thermodynamics! Murphy! There will be leaks.)

        So this sounds like a good thing to try. If there's enough energy available I'm sure that the CO can be processed into something useful, possibly plastic if we can design a carbon based plastic that doesn't depend on lots of Hydrogen.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:44AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:44AM (#1034717)

        The reason why the fuels we use are convenient and useful is because of their energy density. To convert a whole lot of carbon dioxide to oxygen and carbon monoxide may require a whole lot of energy so you might have to start out with an energy dense source to begin with ... which it would probably be more efficient to simply use the energy dense source more directly in the first place instead of making all these energy costing conversions.

        The mechanism used for MOXIE [wikipedia.org] won't require additional power for the electrolysis.

        That said, if only there was a gigantic energy source that lasted billions of years, blasting energy in all directions 24/7. I wonder where we could find something like that [researchgate.net].

        If only we could find and harness such a power source. It's not like we have any technology here on Earth [wikipedia.org] that could take advantage of such a power source [wikipedia.org], if it existed.

        But that's even less likely than commercial fusion, right?

        And even if it did, how could we possibly do that on Mars [nasa.gov]?

        Oh well, I guess we'll just have to ship millions of tons of coal to Mars, or else we won't be able to power anything at all. Sigh.

    • (Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:30AM (1 child)

      by arslan (3462) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:30AM (#1034670)

      Total space newbie here. How difficult would it be to create a space elevator on Mars given the lower gravity and almost non-existent atmosphere? Just wondering if that would maybe be a better option for 2 way transport from/to its orbit...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @05:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @05:44PM (#1034418)

    (well ... I guess they would have to bring up the hydrocarbons/fuel to mars but not the oxygen so they supposedly save on the cost of transporting the oxygen to Mars ... but they still need something to power the conversion of atmospheric carbon dioxide into usable oxygen. Perhaps someone should do the required energy calculations ... but I'm too lazy).