Successful bet for NASA, which managed to produce 100 minutes of oxygen on the planet Mars. According Slatethe agency has developed the Moxie device, which stands for “Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment”, consisting of pumps and compressors that suck carbon dioxide from Mars.
“It’s a brilliant success”
This had been sent to Mars in February 2021 with the rover Perseverance, to the front of which it had been fixed. Moxie would thus have produced 15 minutes of oxygen per hour for seven hours. “It’s a brilliant success”, welcomed Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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MIT’s MOXIE experiment started making oxygen on Mars in April 2021, when it touched down as part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. The instrument is now reliably producing six grams of oxygen per hour — about the rate of a modest tree on Earth. https://t.co/Isgh6kX0S9 pic.twitter.com/17qJC81NNe
— Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (@MIT) September 1, 2022
A result considered all the more interesting and promising as multiple oxygen production conditions were tested by the teams. Thus, day or night, even in extreme temperatures or in a sandstorm, the Moxie device would have succeeded in producing pure and usable oxygen, recalls the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in a blog post.
Renew the experience on a large scale
Building on this success, NASA now plans to repeat the experiment on a larger scale and thus increase the volume of oxygen produced. Ultimately, it could thus allow the supply of oxygen to human teams sent to Mars for an entire stay, return journey included.
A major gamble with regard to the physical and technical parameters involved in the equation. It will inevitably be necessary to go through a larger and more productive version of the instrument. In April 2021, this toaster-sized device managed to produce the equivalent of ten minutes of oxygen.