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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 10 2020, @05:37PM (3 children)
True enough, but if we're going to terraform, I'd rather be starting that from a primarily CO2 atmosphere than one that is a mix of CO2 and significant amounts of CO.
I might compare this to the gold miners of the 1800s who polluted the land with mercury and other nasties so they could extract a little gold....
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:14PM
If you are terraforming then even if there were a significant concentration of CO in the atmosphere, it won't stick around for long anyway once the atmosphere is otherwise breathable as CO reacts with both oxygen and water.
CO in the martian atmosphere is a total non-issue for human habitability.
Moreover CO's reactions are widely used in various industrial processes so a martian habitat which converted atmospheric CO2 to oxygen and CO would likely be keeping both reagents for use and you wouldn't be venting the CO into the atmosphere anyway.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday August 10 2020, @08:42PM (1 child)
IIUC, CO is rather unstable as a gas, and in any case this won't generate much of it.
If you're talking about plans to use it to replenish a base's atmosphere or for rocket fuel, the CO will probably not be emitted, but saved for some particular use. Purified chemicals are often rather useful.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 10 2020, @11:08PM
🌻🌻 [google.com]