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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: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:47PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:47PM (#1034970) Journal

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:22PM (#1035130)

    You seem to have a very interesting definition for "trivial." I don't think that word means what you think it does.