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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 takyon on Monday August 10 2020, @09:34PM (1 child)
The engineering on domes could be tough. I think it will be a "tent city" for a long time, with various buildings, ice homes, caverns, stainless steel grain silos, etc. strewn about. Keep things separate/redundant and a failure or deranged Martian can only do minimal damage.
The suit should be developed soon, if SpaceX is really planning to send a couple of humans there before 2030. But is Mars regolith any worse than Moon regolith? I was under the impression that the Moon dust is more hazardous to lungs and machinery because there is no wind erosion grinding it down.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:55AM
Tents are too fragile, though by domes I wasn't talking about any particular architecture, but just about an enclosed pressurized environment a lot smaller than "outdoors". A buried tube would count. Redundancy is important, of course, but so is durability of each as an individual item...you're going to need both.
OTOH, of course this depends a lot on what you mean by "tent city". Plastic film can be reasonably tough, and if you bury it, then it doesn't get exposed to things that would damage it. This is particularly true if you have a layer of ice over it, but I'm a bit dubious about that. The living quarters would be a lot warmer then the surface. A very light tar would probably be a better choice. Light enough to still be viscously fluid at Mars surface temperature, but not light enough to be a real liquid a room temperature. (I wonder if you could make something like that from CO.)
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