NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.
NASA said Wednesday (April 21) that the Mars Exploration Rover Perseverance continues to make history, successfully converting carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into oxygen on April 20, the first time oxygen has been produced successfully on another planet.
This is the second time that Trailblazer has made history since landing on Mars, the first being the successful maiden flight of the unmanned helicopter Innovation.
NASA designed the Mars oxygen experiment to explore whether humans can go to Mars in the future to “get oxygen” on the spot, without having to bring their own oxygen to do interplanetary travel.
Comprehensive Central News Agency and other media reports, NASA space technology mission deputy director Jim Reuter (Jim Reuter) said: “On Mars to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, is a very important first step.”
“Perseverance is using the Mars Oxygen In situ resource utilization Experiment (MOXIE), designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and built into its right front. resource utilization Experiment (MOXIE) to produce oxygen, this car battery-sized gold box using electricity and chemical properties of the decomposition of carbon dioxide molecules, the successful production of oxygen.
Mars atmosphere composition is dominated by carbon dioxide, accounting for 96%, oxygen only 0.13%; Earth’s atmosphere oxygen accounted for 21%.
Since carbon dioxide is composed of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms, the by-product of MOXIE’s oxygen production is carbon monoxide.
MOXIE can not only produce oxygen for future astronauts on Mars to breathe, but also for future rocket return trips, without having to haul large amounts of oxygen from Earth as propellant, which is expected to pave the way for future human exploration.
MOXIE’s first report card is the production of 5 grams of oxygen, which is equivalent to the amount of breath needed by an astronaut to perform normal activities for 10 minutes. MOXIE was originally designed to produce up to 10 grams of oxygen per hour, and engineers will now conduct more experiments to try to increase production.
MOXIE is made of heat-resistant materials such as nickel alloy, which can withstand temperatures of 800 degrees Celsius, and a thin gold coating on top ensures that it will not emit heat that could damage the “Trailblazer.
MIT engineer Mike Hecht (Michael Hecht) said that a one-ton version of MOXIE can produce about 25 tons of oxygen for the rocket to launch from Mars.
Transporting 25 metric tons of oxygen from Earth to Mars would be a daunting task, he explained, but transporting a one-ton oxygen converter (a future version of the larger, more powerful MOXIE that could produce 25 tons of oxygen) would be more economical.
Since 96 percent of the Martian atmosphere is carbon dioxide, producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere would be much more feasible than extracting ice from beneath the Martian surface to produce oxygen.
Trudy Kortes of NASA’s Space Technology Division explained that MOXIE is not only the first instrument to successfully produce oxygen on other worlds beyond Earth, but also a pioneer of its kind in helping future space exploration teams adapt to local conditions.
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