NASA made sufficient oxygen on Mars to final an astronaut for 100 minutes

NASA’s MOXIE experiment on Mars has produced about 100 minutes’ price of breathable oxygen, elevating hopes for future crewed missions

Artist's concept pf Perseverance rover

The MOXIE experiment landed on Mars on NASA’s Perseverance rover (artists’s impression)

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s small experiment to provide oxygen on Mars managed to generate about 100 minutes’ price of breathable oxygen in 2021. Now it's set to be scaled as much as assist future human exploration.

The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Useful resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) is a small oxygen-generating system that landed on the Crimson Planet atop the Perseverance rover in February 2021.

Over the course of seven hour-long manufacturing runs throughout that yr, MOXIE was in a position to reliably produce roughly quarter-hour of oxygen per hour in quite a lot of harsh planetary situations. That added as much as a complete of fifty grams of oxygen in whole – about 100 minutes’ price of breathable oxygen for a single astronaut.

“On the highest stage, that is only a sensible success,” says Michael Hecht on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how Haystack Observatory, who co-leads the MOXIE experiment.

In day or evening, at totally different excessive temperatures and within the wake of a mud storm, Hecht says that MOXIE continued producing high-purity oxygen.

The NASA staff is now trying to create a much bigger model of the system, which might produce not solely sufficient life assist for a crewed Mars mission, but in addition sufficient oxygen to propel a return rocket to Earth.

MOXIE requires pumps and compressors to suck in carbon dioxide from the Martian ambiance in addition to heaters that may increase the air’s temperature to 800°C (1470°F).

The system then pulls the oxygen atoms from the carbon dioxide to provide oxygen fuel, which MOXIE has been measuring, earlier than releasing it.

There can be some challenges in scaling up this expertise, although, says Gerald Sanders on the NASA Johnson House Middle in Houston, Texas.

These embody having the ability to insulate a bigger model of MOXIE to handle its inside temperature and guaranteeing that the system heats up uniformly to forestall it from breaking.

Sanders additionally says that an oxygen system that may assist a human mission would wish to function repeatedly for about 400 days, and up to now, MOXIE’s runs have solely lasted for an hour every.

“That’s lots of hours to placed on the hardware, regardless of what the expertise is,” he says.

Nonetheless, MOXIE’s first yr of success has been an enormous step ahead in exhibiting the expertise’s potential, says Sanders.

NASA is now testing the hardware wanted at a scale that may be related to a human mission. The bigger model is more likely to be a couple of cubic metre in measurement, which shouldn’t current an issue for launches.

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