Posted on 04/22/2021 10:25:17 AM PDT by BenLurkin
After making the first-ever powered flight on another world, NASA's Mars 2020 mission has managed another key first that could pave the way for future astronauts by making breathable oxygen out of the wispy Martian air.
NASA announced that an instrument aboard the rover had successfully extracted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on Mars and then electrochemically split oxygen atoms from carbon dioxide molecules.
The Martian atmosphere is about 95% carbon dioxide. The remainder is mostly nitrogen and argon.
The feat, announced Wednesday, is considered vital to any long-term stay for humans on Mars, as bringing an ample supply of oxygen from Earth would likely prove impractical. It came ahead of a second successful test of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, after its historic maiden flight on Monday.
The second flight "reached new milestones of higher altitude, a longer hover and lateral flying," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in a tweet.
Go big or go home! The #MarsHelicopter successfully completed its 2nd flight, capturing this image with its black-and-white navigation camera. It also reached new milestones of a higher altitude, a longer hover and lateral flying. pic.twitter.com/F3lwcV9kH2
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 22, 2021 "MOXIE isn't just the first instrument to produce oxygen on another world," Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations with NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate said in a statement. She called it the first technology of its kind to help future missions "live off the land" of another planet.
The Perseverance rover used an instrument known as MOXIE, or Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, which super-heated the carbon dioxide to chemically cleave it, producing about 5 grams of pure O2 – about enough for an astronaut to breathe for 10 minutes, according to NASA.
"This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars," said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for STMD.
Engineers hope that MOXIE can be scaled up to produce enough oxygen for future human flights to Mars. A group of four astronauts on the red planet would require an estimated one metric ton of oxygen between them to last an entire year, MOXIE principal investigator Michael Hecht, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a NASA news release.
Oxygen produced on Mars could also be used in combination with rocket fuel to propel rockets returning to Earth. NASA estimates that 25 metric tons of oxygen would be needed for such a rocket carrying four astronauts. An industrial-sized MOXIE-style instrument for use on Mars might weigh about a metric ton, Hecht said last year.
On Monday, the twin-rotor Mars helicopter, Ingenuity – part of the Mars 2020 mission that includes the rover and the MOXIE instrument — became the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet.
The 4-pound Ingenuity rose 10 feet in the air, hovered briefly, and landed back on the Martian surface without incident. The helicopter, which has an onboard camera, is still being tested, but more ambitious flights are scheduled as the mission progresses.
The air pressure on Mars is tiny. It would take a huge amount of energy to convert enough for humans, much less filling a fuel tank for a trip home.
I’m long removed from my days of stoichiometric conversions, but isn’t it possible to separate the oxygen from the carbon as free form with no byproduct?
CO2 -> CO + O -> C + O + O
I’m legitimately curious.
Doesn't anyone see the long term implications here? They''ll fill our skies with their flying saucers, wreck havoc with their heat ray, let loose genetically altered giant bugs! We're doomed! DOOMED I tell ya!
Is it available on Amazon Prime?
However, Moxie was great when it applied to describing girls we knew...
Just remembering a little from the 1940's & 1950's...
We really need a :like button”!!!
Someone should tell Sheila Jackson Lee that someone got to Mars before our astronauts.
The George Floyd Experiment so we can breathe
Thank you for the chuckle. I needed that.
This would lead to Global Martian cooling, as CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
The moon, by contrast, has no atmosphere to speak of, maybe no water, and is +250 degrees in the sun and -250 in the shade. Venus is the same size as Earth, closer than Mars, and has plenty of atmosphere. Bad news: the atmosphere is C02 and sulfuric acid. More bad news: the surface temperature is 800 degrees. Even robotic spacecraft only last an hour or two on Venus.
The bad news about Mars is that it's eight months away if you use a minimum-energy flight plan. The moon is only three days away.
Wonder where all that c02 came from. Fossil fuels? what was by product of reaction: pure carbon and 02...or carbon monoxide and 0(which would join with another free 0 atom to form more stable 02 molecule)?...they could theoretically make synthetic gasoline from c02 and water....being done on earth already
That’s exporting (gasp) CLIMATE CHANGE!!!! And on Erf Day no less!!!!
p
“This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars,”
= = =
Well, start here on Erf.
And save it from the molten desolate future that Mars represents.
And Elon Musk says, I’m on it like a fly on ——
= = =
on what?, Flypaper????
whoa...assuming they created this in a sealed environment?
otherwise, if it escapes into the mars atmosphere - mars-a-nado ? - the beginning of the destruction of our galaxy?
Or "I fly like a s**t on IT!"
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