Mars mission cooks up some fresh air
A NASA gadget has made oxygen out of the CO2 saturated atmosphere on Mars – in a leap towards one day sending humans to the Red Planet.
The toaster- sized device named Moxie (Mars Oxygen in-Situ Resource Utilization experiment) converted carbon dioxide (CO2) into 5.4 grams of oxygen – enough for an astronaut to breath for ten minutes.
CO2 makes up about 96 per cent of the ultra-thin Martian atmosphere, which only contains 0.13 per cent oxygen.
Jim Reuter, of nasa’s space technology mission directorate, called the oxygen trial ‘a critical first step’. He said: ‘Moxie has more work to do, but the results from this demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars.
‘Oxygen isn’t just the stuff we breathe. Rocket propellant depends on oxygen, and future explorers will depend on producing propellant on Mars to make the trip home.’
Moxie was carried to Mars aboard nasa’s Perseverance rover which landed on February 18 to look for signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and soil.
it ‘inhales’ CO2 and electrochemically separates oxygen atoms from the CO2 gas molecules. The oxygen was produced in an hour-long experiment on Tuesday. it is the first technology of its kind to help manned Martian missions ‘live off the land’ by using aspects of another world’s environment.
nine more Moxie trials are planned over the next Martian year – equal to 687 earth days – and future devices could provide breathable air. But the technology would need to be 100 times larger to support human missions. Scientists say getting four astronauts off the Martian surface would require approximately 25 tons of oxygen.
The news came as the ingenuity helicopter, which carried out the first powered, controlled flight on another world, successfully completed a second, riskier challenge.
it took off at 12.33pm Mars-time yesterday and climbed to a height of 16ft (five metres), after managing just 10ft (three metres) during its maiden flight, and flew for 51.9 seconds in total.
Mars’s thin atmosphere means ingenuity’s rotors have to spin six times faster than on earth and it is much harder to pilot.
Havard Grip, ingenuity’s chief pilot at nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory in southern California, said: ‘The helicopter came to a stop, hovered in place and made turns to point its camera in different directions.
‘Then it headed back to the centre of the airfield to land. it sounds simple, but there are many unknowns regarding how to fly a helicopter on Mars. That’s why we’re here – to make these unknowns known.’