NASA’s Perseverance rover just scored another first on Mars, one that may help make ready for astronauts to explore the Red Planet sometime in the future.
The rover effectively utilized its MOXIE instrument to generate oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere for the first time, demonstrating technology that could both assist astronauts with breathing and help propel the rockets that get them back home to Earth.
The MOXIE milestone happened on Tuesday (April 20), only one day after Perseverance looked after another epic Martian first — the first Mars flight of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, which rode to the Red Planeton the rover’s belly.
“This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars,” Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a statement today (April 21). “MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars.”
Making Mars oxygen
The toaster-sized MOXIE (another way to say “Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment”) produces oxygen from carbon dioxide, expelling carbon monoxide as a waste product. The conversion process happens at temperatures around 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius), so MOXIE is made of heat-tolerant materials and features a thin gold coating to keep conceivably damaging heat from radiating outward into Perseverance’s body.
The MOXIE team warmed the instrument awake for two hours yesterday, at that point had it wrench out oxygen for 60 minutes. MOXIE created 5.4 grams of oxygen during that length, about enough to keep a astronaut breathing effectively for 10 minutes, NASA authorities said.
That first effort didn’t maximize MOXIE; it can generate around 10 grams of oxygen each hour. The instrument may arrive at such levels at last, for the team plans to conduct around nine additional runs throughout the course of one Mars year (around 687 Earth days).
These trials will be grouped into three phases, NASA authorities said. The first phase is checking and characterizing 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,” MOXIE principal investigator Michael Hecht said in the same statement.
Pushing the envelope will probably include testing new operating modes or adding “new wrinkles, such as a run where we compare operations at three or more different temperatures,” added Hecht, who’s based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory.
MOXIE and humanity’s future on Mars
MOXIE itself can’t cannot produce enough oxygen to have an effect for future exploration efforts. For instance, launching four astronauts off the Martian surface would almost certainly need around 15,000 lbs. (7,000 kilograms) of rocket fuel and 55,000 lbs. (25,000 kg) of oxygen, NASA officials said. (Rocket propellant consists of fuel and an oxidizer that helps it burn.)
However, a lot bigger MOXIE successors might actually be great exploration enablers, permitting Mars astronauts to “live off the land” as opposed to rely upon exorbitant and infrequent resupply from Earth, agency officials have said.
Perseverance touched down inside the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, entrusted with hunting for signs of ancient Mars life and collecting samples for future re-visitation of Earth. The rover will be able to focus fully on those core jobs in about two weeks, when Ingenuity’s month-long flight window reaches a end.
Also, MOXIE will keep on doing its thing in the background, pumping little puffs of carbon monoxide into the dusty Mars air sometimes to animate the six-wheeled robot’s considerable labors.