SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 10 2020, @05:58PM (6 children)
Certain Mars rockets want methalox (methane + oxygen). You can get the energy to make that from the Sun.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:00PM (5 children)
but then you need hydrogen ....
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday August 10 2020, @06:07PM (4 children)
Water ice. There's a lot of it [wikipedia.org] on Mars, including nice accessible deposits like this one [wikipedia.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:18PM (3 children)
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
uhm ... interesting stuff. Might actually have use one day.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday August 11 2020, @12:54AM (1 child)
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.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:51AM
It's actually electrolysis that MOXIE is going to do (for about an hour)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Oxygen_ISRU_Experiment [wikipedia.org]