A historic achievement has been achieved NASAas a handbag-sized experimental device that is aboard the Perseverance robotic rover. oxygen to Mars.

In fact, doing the “work” of one small treethe oxygen produced by this little device was enough to breathe for 100 minutes astronaut.

Method under consideration MOXI (The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Exploitation Experiment) will now be used on a larger scale to assist future manned missions.

MOXIE, which arrived on Mars in February 2021 along with Perseverance, was able to produce oxygen at a rate of about six grams per hour (about the same as a small tree produces) and even in difficult planetary conditions. In total, he has already produced 50 grams of oxygen, which is enough for 100 minutes of astronaut breathing.

It was a “brilliant success,” said lead researcher Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as the device continued to produce high-quality oxygen day and night. in all seasons of the year on the Red Planet and at various extreme temperatureseven after a dust storm.

Useful device for human mission

The researchers presented the results for the first time in a scientific journal. “Scientific achievements”.

“This is the first demonstration of actually extracting resources from the surface of another planetary body and chemically converting them into something that could be useful for the human mission. In that sense, this is a historic event,” said Jeffrey Hoffman, professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The device uses filters, pumps and compressors to pump carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere, filtered and purified, compressed and heated to 800 degrees Celsius, then electrochemically separated into oxygen atoms (ions) and carbon monoxide, until finally the oxygen atoms are isolated and combined to obtain breathable gaseous molecular oxygen, which is released into the air.

Hopes for an oxygen plant on Mars

NASA is currently working on one longer version devices with a volume of about one cubic meter (100 times larger than the current MOPS), which is fraught with technical difficulties.

Such a larger device could produce enough oxygen at a rate the equivalent of hundreds of trees – not only for the entire crew of the Martian mission, but also for 30-50 tons of fuel (liquid oxygen) that will be required for launch and return to Earth, so that it does not have to be transported in advance so much oxygen from our planet to Mars.

Gradually, with the help of more such devices, one oxygen production plant on a nearby planet, taking advantage of the abundant carbon dioxide that exists there and makes up about 96% of the Martian atmosphere.

However, to support the mission of the astronauts, the oxygen generator would have to operate continuously for about 400 days.

So far, MOXIE, which continues to operate on Mars, has been running for a maximum of an hour at a time (a total of seven times at different times). In any case, its technology is considered promising.

With information from APE-MPE