GOLDEN, Colorado – Breathe easy: There’s good news from Mars.
Embedded inside NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is a device known as MOXIE, short for Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. MOXIE is the first attempt to absorb the Earth’s thin, carbon dioxide-rich air and convert the natural resource into gas. A small toaster device, if made larger, could be used not only for a trip to Mars for space, but also for rocket fuel.
Earlier this month, the experiment achieved a major milestone when researchers pushed MOXIE to the next production level – twice as much as it had previously reached.
Related: Perseverance rover: NASA’s Mars rover in search of signs of ancient life
A very dangerous rush
“We got some really good results,” said Michael Hecht, MOXIE’s principal investigator and associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts.
“This was the most dangerous process we’ve ever done,” Hecht told Space.com in an exclusive interview. “This could have gone wrong,” he said, and it would have caused the weapon to be slightly damaged, but it wasn’t. The Mars mission took place on June 6, operating during the Martian night, and lasted 58 minutes, Hecht said.
MOXIE’s requirements were to produce 6 grams of oxygen per hour, a rate that was eventually doubled. “We rolled the dice a little bit. It was ‘hold your breath and see what happens,'” Hecht said.
Unofficially described by Hecht and his team as “the final whistle,” MOXIE delivered the payload on its 15th trip to Mars since it blasted through the Martian atmosphere at Jezero Crater on April 20, 2021.
The challenge all along, Hecht added, has been to define the process of working on Mars efficiently to produce a high yield of oxygen.
Care of electricity
Hecht presented a review of MOXIE, detailing the Martian year of use at the site on the Red Planet at the 23rd Space Resources Roundtable, held June 6-9 at the Colorado School of Mines.
MOXIE weighs about 18 kilograms and is designed to draw in Martian air using a pump before using an electrochemical process to separate one atom of oxygen from each molecule of carbon dioxide. As a result, carbon monoxide is produced, as is a black residue of solid carbon that can interfere with operation inside the device, Hecht said. So electrical precautions are needed when the MOXIE does its high-temperature, air-generating work, he added.
Operating one hour at a time, MOXIE ran seven times in 2021, primarily to ensure that the instrument can operate in the various environments that Earth will encounter throughout the Martian year. (A year on Mars can be twice as long as it is on Earth because of the Red Planet’s orbit around the sun.)
In 2022, MOXIE’s engineers focused on pushing the unit’s power, as well as creating new ways of working. All in all, the first 14 startups added up to 1,000 minutes of operating time. “It’s been an interesting journey,” Hecht told the Colorado School of Mines audience.
But MOXIE is a technical show, and like many other shows, its longevity is tied to money. MOXIE’s research funding is set to run out by the end of the year, Hecht said, with the MIT lab responsible for overseeing the new collaboration.
A complete system
Regarding MOXIE’s results, Hecht said that the test results encourage the development of a global system on Earth, which continuously emits oxygen in a self-sustaining manner and can produce 25 to 30 tons of oxygen to support a person. mission to Mars. “This is all about life. We run one hour at a time. To do this in the future we will be able to run 10,000 hours.”
Understanding how far MOXIE can push before it goes down is important. “On Mars you don’t get second chances,” Hecht told Space.com. “We can burn it at 12 grams per hour and let it burn for a long time.”
There might be value in coming back in a year, Hecht noted, to retest to see if anything has been damaged by age and exposure to the Martian environment.
“MOXIE is not going anywhere to be safe and sound on Mars,” Hecht said.
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