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The surface of Mars, dusty and devoid of anything resembling life as we know it, is hardly the kind of environment we humans can call 'home'. Further, with 96% of its atmosphere comprising of carbon dioxide and virtually no vegetation to speak of, the prospect of us Earthlings settling there has always seemed far-fetched.
But what if we told you that while humanity is yet to plant oxygen-producing trees on the Red Planet, it may have done the next best thing?
MIT engineers had a lunchbox-sized device delivered all the way to Mars last year, and this little box has successfully been able to produce the amount of oxygen equivalent to the quantity released by a tree in the otherwise inhospitable environs since April 2021.
The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilisation Experiment, or MOXIE, designed by researchers at MIT, weighs around 17 kgs on Earth (6.4 kg on Mars) and can produce oxygen at the rate of up to 10 grams per hour. Since its inception, the instrument has been able to produce oxygen on seven experimental runs in Mars’ various atmospheric conditions, including during the day and night and through different Martian seasons.
In each run, MOXIE has reached its target of producing six grams of oxygen per hour — about the rate of a modest tree on Earth using the abundant carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.
"This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission. It's historic in that sense," says MOXIE deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of the practice in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
The current MOXIE is built to run for brief intervals of time, starting up and shutting down with each run, depending on the Perseverance rover's exploration schedule and mission tasks. It is compact by design to fit within the rover. However, MOXIE has demonstrated that despite the inevitable trade-offs in its current architecture, it can reliably and effectively convert Mars' atmospheric carbon dioxide into pure oxygen.
To do this, it draws in Martian air and passes it through a filter to remove any impurities. In the Solid OXide Electrolyzer (SOXE), the compressed air is split into oxygen ions and carbon monoxide by electrochemical reactions.
The oxygen ions are then separated and united again to create breathable molecular oxygen, or O2, which MOXIE then analyses for quantity and purity before releasing it back into the atmosphere with carbon monoxide and other atmospheric gases.
Larger units in a full-scale oxygen plant would ideally run continuously. And according to researchers, a scaled-up MOXIE may be transported to Mars before a human trip to create oxygen continually at the rate of several hundred trees!
At that capacity, the system should be able to produce enough oxygen to support people once they arrive as well as power a rocket for astronauts returning to Earth.
"To support a human mission to Mars, we have to bring a lot of stuff from Earth, like computers, spacesuits, and habitats," Hoffman says. "But dumb old oxygen? If you can make it there, go for it — you're way ahead of the game."
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