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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 dry on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:59AM (5 children)
The gravity control or rather producing fake gravity with centrifugal force is relatively simple. Could just attach 2 capsules together with a tether and spin it, or better attach to a central object like a propulsion stage. The closed ecology is likely the hardest, though once on Mars, it doesn't have to be completely closed as there is CO2, H2O and various minerals outside the ecology that can be added to the inside, still likely to be tricky balancing an ecology.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 11 2020, @12:20PM (4 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus-X#Status_as_of_2011 [wikipedia.org]
Nautilus-X ISS demo: Less than $200 million
Status: What's Nautilus-X? Time to deorbit the ISS
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Tuesday August 11 2020, @02:58PM (3 children)
Looks too small to actually be useful. A rotating habitat has to be big enough with low enough RPM that there isn't a particular large gravity gradient between head and feet. There's other issues such as Coriolis force as well. Still have to start somewhere and one thing it would be nice to know is the minimum G force needed for health.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:47PM (2 children)
NASA likes to do smaller experiments before scaling things up. Like how the CO2 converter in TFA will produce a small amount of gas, and won't be filling up giant tanks for future astronauts to use.
For the price of SLS/Orion development, we could have had hundreds of neat experiments like the Nautilus-X demonstrator. SLS can't be killed fast enough.
My guess is that almost any amount of simulated gravity will cut microgravity health risks dramatically. But it might as well be set at 0.165g to simulate a long-term Moon experience. Sending thousands of people there will become trivial soon, so it's past time to investigate long-term partial gravity health effects.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:22PM (1 child)
You seem to have a very interesting definition for "trivial." I don't think that word means what you think it does.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:50PM
Relatively trivial. And if you don't agree you need to pay more attention to what's going on.
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