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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: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday August 10 2020, @06:12PM (5 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 10 2020, @06:12PM (#1034433) Journal

    "Mars is essentially in the same orbit. Mars is somewhat the same
    distance from the sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures
    where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water,
    that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."

                        -- US Vice President Dan Quayle

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday August 10 2020, @08:38PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 10 2020, @08:38PM (#1034512) Journal

    That checked out on several links. This is one of them:
    https://meyerweb.com/other/humor/quayle.html [meyerweb.com]

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday August 10 2020, @08:45PM (2 children)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Monday August 10 2020, @08:45PM (#1034515)

    You made that up! There's no way someone that stupid could ever be the Vice-President of a major country.

    Hang on, wow. He really was that stupid.

    That might be what they call "failing up".

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @08:53PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @08:53PM (#1034522)

      Quayle may have been dumb, but he was only vice president, not the president, who actually makes decisions. Joe Biden, on the other hand... /shudder/... Oh, who are we kidding, Biden's so dumb they won't let him make any decisions, it'll be the vice president who does that. A fearful symmetry of stupidity. Thanks for bringing up old Dan Q.!

    • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:17AM

      by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:17AM (#1034734) Journal

      There was a popular theory at the time that appointing Quayle as VP was a way to prevent assassinating the P. Nobody wanted Quayle to take over.

      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday August 11 2020, @12:18AM

    by anubi (2828) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @12:18AM (#1034631) Journal

    I just had to moderate it funny...

    But all too many "leadership" positions of authority are filled with ignorant people. People who have great "people skills" but little technical skill.

    Combine this with the arrogance that comes with authority, and really bad stuff happens. People with authority override those who know better than to do such a thing.

    And bad things happen.

    A mixture of power, ignorance, and arrogance is a sure fire formula for a full scale clusterfuck.

    Now that I am out of the business, this is so damm obvious when I see it, and it's kinda entertaining to watch as little as one suit guy take the whole company down. All he needs is the asskiss skill to please the folks above him, and the authority to dismiss those below him. For him, it's one great party. And the company eventually comes down like a bridge with eroded pilings. All that's left are handshakers, paper signers, accountants, tax men salesmen, liasons to customers, and no one left who knows how the company's product works.

    They outsourced that rather unimportant part of corporate operations. H1B, China, wherever.

    I've just told you why Congressmen try so hard to get re-elected. They don't like the idea of being compelled to have to live under the laws they passed.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]