Just Like That, We're Making Oxygen on Mars
Link to tweet
The Atlantic
@TheAtlantic
·
Follow
We've managed to produce at least one basic need of future human missions to Mars: A toaster-size machine has gotten quite good at making breathable oxygen out of the alien atmosphere, @marinakoren reports.
theatlantic.com
Just Like That, We’re Making Oxygen on Mars
A small experiment on a NASA rover is tinkering with the alien atmosphere.
11:37 AM · Sep 12, 2022
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/09/mars-life-moxie-experiment-oxygen-perseverance-rover/671391/
No paywall
https://archive.ph/xzCxn
Millions of miles away on Mars, in a barren crater just north of the equator, a rover is wandering around, carrying a gold-coated gadget the size of a toaster. The machine inhales the Martian air and strips away contaminants. It splits the atmospheric gas into constituent parts, takes what it needs, and then reassembles that blend to create something that is in very short supply on Mars: oxygen. Real, breathable oxygen, the kind you took in as you read these sentences.
After a bit of analysis, the machine puffs out the oxygen, harmlessly releasing the molecules into the Martian environment. The act makes this very sophisticated toaster, situated in the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover, the closest thing to a small tree on Mars.
And according to the researchers behind the little machine, it’s a pretty good tree. Every time they’ve run it, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment—MOXIE, for short—has successfully converted Martian air, which is almost entirely made of carbon dioxide, into oxygen gas. “We’re not far from being able to produce oxygen at the rate that would sustain a human being,” Michael Hecht, a planetary scientist at MIT’s Haystack Observatory who leads the project, told me. “A small dog would be just fine at the rate that we produce.”
MOXIE is a clever chemistry experiment. It is also a remarkable event in the history of space exploration. If human beings want to build a long-term home on Mars, they’ll have to make use of the planet’s natural resources instead of lugging everything they need all the way from Earth. “We have to be able to live off the land,” Jennifer Heldmann, a NASA scientist who works in this futuristic field—known as in situ resource utilization—told me. “This is the first time that we’ve been able to test and demonstrate the technology to do that.”
*snip*
= new reply since forum marked as read
is that Earth is exceptional in many ways - it's a water world in the Goldilocks zone, it is effectively a binary planet, which in turn makes seasons possible but not extreme, it is large enough to hold most of its critical volatiles, it has a magnetic nickel-iron core that creates a protective magnetic shield against the radiation of the nearby variable star (the sun is stable-ish). None of the other planets in the solar system satisfy any of these conditions (Venus is sun-locked, Mars is tectonically dead, just outside the GZ, and has two small, captured asteroids as "moons"
.
Ironically, of the two, if there were a way to push Venus out of its current orbit and give it a spin, Venus could be terraformed successfully- though the energy involved would be in the peta-Watt range. It's possible that an artificial magnetosphere could be set up for the planet by setting up a powerful enough dipole at Venus's L1 point.
A Martian L1 dipole couple could potentially retard the ablation of volatiles from the Martian atmosphere for a few kYears, but Mars simply lacks enough resources for a long term society.
