If we want to harvest oxygen on Mars for use by future explorers or launch systems, a better way might be to pull some of it out of the CO2 and use that instead. That’s where MOXIE comes in.
MOXIE is a technology on NASA’s Perseverance rover, and it has proven for the very first time that we can extract oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.
MOXIE is a technology on NASA’s Perseverance rover, and it has proven for the very first time that we can extract oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.
It’s a technology demonstration so it only produces a small amount of oxygen. For future human exploration, we would need to send a scaled-up version, maybe 200 times larger than the current MOXIE.
If such a system landed on Mars, some of this would provide oxygen for the astronauts to breathe but most of it would be used as rocket propellant to get astronauts off the surface of Mars and back to Earth.
So, is there oxygen on Mars? Not much, but that’s okay because we can make it ourselves.
If such a system landed on Mars, some of this would provide oxygen for the astronauts to breathe but most of it would be used as rocket propellant to get astronauts off the surface of Mars and back to Earth.
So, is there oxygen on Mars? Not much, but that’s okay because we can make it ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment