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.
95% CO2? Not possible according to global warming doctrine, the planet would be molten rock.
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That’s why they moved it so far from the sun. Erf next.
no fungi.
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You would know ...
The bad news about Mars is that it’s eight months away if you use a minimum-energy flight plan.
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Conversely we had built the 1958 Orion, it would have take 3 weeks, but then, we would have done that by 1965 and have gone to Saturn by 1970. By now, the return flight of the colony ship from A Centauri system would be nearing Earth.
I was never great at chemistry and also long out of school, but the equation must be balanced.
For creating CO2 from CO and O2, to get a balanced equation requires:
2CO + O2 → 2CO2
I must just presume you can also go the other way. I am guessing some energy has to be expended to force that.
Oxygen is not stable in a free form state, and will naturally convert to O2. The conversion by MOXIE on the rover produces C+CO+O2 in a high heat reaction.
Mars at one time had more atmosphere, but lacked the liquid oceans and magnetosphere of earth, so most of it was stripped away. Earth is a very special case where the environment was perfect for complex life.
Something is causing out gassing on Mars ...
There is an old Arthur C. Clarke novel - The Sands of Mars - where the problem of oxygen on Mars is solved by lighting one of the moons off as a second sun to get plants to grow.
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