NASA’s Perseverance makes oxygen on Mars for the first time
NASA’s Perseverance rover just notched another first on Mars, one that may help pave the way for astronauts to explore the Red Planet someday. The rover successfully used its MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) instrument to generate oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere for the first time, demonstrating technology that could both help astronauts breathe and help propel the rockets that get them back home to Earth.
The MOXIE milestone occurred on 20 April, just one day after Perseverance watched over another epic Martian first: the first Mars flight of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, which rode to the Red Planet on the rover’s belly. “This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars,” said Jim Reuter, acting associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. “MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move towards our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars.”
The toaster-sized MOXIE produces oxygen from carbon dioxide, expelling carbon monoxide as a waste product. The process occurs at temperatures around 800 degrees Celsius
(1,472 degrees Fahrenheit), so MOXIE is made of heat-tolerant materials and features a thin gold coating to keep potentially damaging heat from radiating outward into Perseverance’s body. The MOXIE team warmed the instrument up for two hours, then had it crank out oxygen for an hour. MOXIE produced 5.4 grams of oxygen during that span, about enough to keep an astronaut breathing easily for ten minutes. That first effort didn’t max MOXIE out; it can generate about ten grams of oxygen per hour. The instrument may reach such levels eventually, as the team plans to conduct about nine more runs over the course of one Mars year.
These trials will be grouped into three phases. The first phase is checking and characterising the instrument, and the second will assess MOXIE’s performance in varying atmospheric conditions. During the third and final phase, “we’ll push the envelope,” said MOXIE principal investigator Michael Hecht. Pushing the envelope will likely involve testing new operating modes or adding “new wrinkles, such as a run where we compare operations at three or
more different temperatures”.
“MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise”