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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: 4, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Monday August 10 2020, @08:17PM (3 children)
You are correct. However, the topic is about Mars, which has insignificant atmospheric oxygen.
Mars also has very low atmospheric pressure (less than 1% of Earth's), so a habitat there will need to be pressurized. Should the seals on that environment fail, the pressure will send air outwards (aka positive pressure). Once that has equalized, then Martian atmosphere can mix with the habitat's, but by that time anyone not in a pressure suit will be suffocating due to lack of oxygen.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 10 2020, @09:09PM (2 children)
I feel like that's saying: it's o.k. if we piss in this river, it already has parasites - you shouldn't drink it anyway. Then you can say: it's o.k. if we dump paint in this river, people piss in it anyway. Sooner or later the river catches on fire and people stop to think about choices they have made.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday August 11 2020, @02:21PM
I get what you're saying, but any CO released into the Martian atmosphere will be quickly turned to CO2 again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars#Current_chemical_composition [wikipedia.org] (under Other trace gases)
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Tuesday August 11 2020, @07:08PM
Maybe if the "river" were a few centimeters of moist ground on an otherwise arid, brackish continent.
That's not to say we can't make it worse. But I don't think the metaphor of a river which we know can be essential to life and the development of primitive societies is a good match for the current martian atmosphere. You might want to compare it to a pristine lava flow or a vase cavern with rich expanses of bat guano. Both things we could do something with, include making them worse.