NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover Extracts First Oxygen from Red Planet (nasa.gov) 44
William Robinson shares a report: The growing list of "firsts" for Perseverance, NASA's newest six-wheeled robot on the Martian surface, includes converting some of the Red Planet's thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen. A toaster-size, experimental instrument aboard Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) accomplished the task. The test took place April 20, the 60th Martian day, or sol, since the mission landed Feb. 18. While the technology demonstration is just getting started, it could pave the way for science fiction to become science fact -- isolating and storing oxygen on Mars to help power rockets that could lift astronauts off the planet's surface. Such devices also might one day provide breathable air for astronauts themselves. MOXIE is an exploration technology investigation -- as is the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) weather station -- and is sponsored by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. "This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars," said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for STMD. "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. Oxygen isn't just the stuff we breathe. Rocket propellant depends on oxygen, and future explorers will depend on producing propellant on Mars to make the trip home." For rockets or astronauts, oxygen is key, said MOXIE's principal investigator, Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory.
What about the other gases needed a human? (Score:2)
What about the other components of a breathable atmosphere? Oxygen makes up only 21% of Earth’s atmosphere. Breathing pure oxygen for an extended period of time is toxic to a human.
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Re:What about the other gases needed a human? (Score:5, Informative)
Breathing pure oxygen for an extended period of time is toxic to a human.
Why post on something you know nothing about?
Toxicity is all about the dose, the partial pressure in this case, and not about purity.
Breathing mostly oxygen (you probably want some water vapour) is fine if the total pressure is low enough.
( Gemini? )
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Better tell that to the Apollo astronauts, who operated in a pure oxygen partial pressure atmosphere. Using only oxygen simply means you only need to make 21% as much air.
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Better tell that to the Apollo astronauts, who operated in a pure oxygen partial pressure atmosphere. Using only oxygen simply means you only need to make 21% as much air.
Better tell them yourself, you ignorant ass-clown. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/5... [nasa.gov]
You are talking about different things. JimMcc had posted "Breathing pure oxygen for an extended period of time is toxic to a human." This statement is incorrect. High enough partial pressure of oxygen is toxic, but that's at pressures of higher than about 2 bar. Humans can breathe oxygen, even pure oxygen at sea level pressure, fine.
However, pure oxygen atmospheres increase fire hazard. NASA gave up on pure oxygen atmospheres for that reason-- not because it's toxic (it's not), but because of flammabili
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OP said " who operated in a pure oxygen partial pressure atmosphere". Anything else is not in evidence and irrelevant. It was a false statement which I rectified. End of.
AC is wrong.
From the link the AC supplied: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/5... [nasa.gov]
"The board concluded that astronauts would continue to breathe pure oxygen in their space suits before and during launch to reduce the risk of developing the bends or decompression sickness, since once in orbit the CM’s environmental control system would gradually replace the mixed-gas atmosphere with pure oxygen and reduce the pressure to 5 psi, standard orbital operating conditions for all US spacecraft at the time. The LM
Re:What about the other gases needed a human? (Score:4, Interesting)
Other components don't get used up. Oxygen needs to be replaced, CO2 needs to be scrubbed, nitrogen just lingers around, water vapor will get produced with human breath and needs to be removed, the rest is unimportant.
As for oxygen toxicity, it's neither toxic at reduced pressure nor at normal atmospheric pressure. Oxygen toxicity begins at around 2 bar in pure oxygen atmosphere, after a couple hours.
Re:What about the other gases needed a human? (Score:4, Interesting)
What about the other components of a breathable atmosphere? Oxygen makes up only 21% of Earth’s atmosphere. Breathing pure oxygen for an extended period of time is toxic to a human.
In the short term, I believe it's more about making propellant than air. Not having to land with your ascent propellant frees up a whole lot of cargo for other consumables.
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The real danger in a pure oxygen atmosphere is fire. The tiniest spark becomes an engulfing flame in no time.
That said, Mars itself has plenty of carbon dioxide and a bit of nitrogen. I'm sure there will be more experiments on what to blend to come up with a safe and breathable air equivalent for Mars's first human visitors long before they arrive.
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Having an unreactive 'filler' gas seems to be pretty important, but I don't believe it has to be nitrogen. The important thing is not to have pure oxygen ready to make everything burn, nor let the CO2 percentage get high enough to be toxic to humans.
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Helium is inert and the #2 most common atom in the universe. Let's do this! Mars will be fun as heck.
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You need a much lower mass of those gases than oxygen, since the oxygen is used for both propulsion and life support. The mass of oxygen you need to haul around is more than the mass of anything else... and probably more than the mass of everything else combined.
I love Moxie (Score:2)
Aren't you forgetting something? (Score:3)
After the first successful extraction, Perseverance was quoted as saying, "yeah, that's the good stuff" before snorting the oxygen and yell, "oh fuck that's so pure! You humans are gonna love this shit."
Stop under-representing robots! Do you want a robot rebellion?
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Do you want a robot rebellion?
Yes, please.
hahaha chemical rockets (Score:3)
Chemical rockets are so 20th century, imagine needing to talk about extracting oxygen to make return trip possible. For that matter methane-oxygen is lousy choice. Nuclear rockets assembled, made critical and fired in orbit are clearly the superior way to make round trips to other planets.
Stick with reality. (Score:2)
Chemical rockets are so 20th century
Chemical rockets are the heavy lift rockets we have. Yes, we are working on other designs but we cannot be sure when they will be ready. So yes, we may have to utilize oxygen for rocket fuel on Mars well within the 21st century.
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You still need to land and take off. It's only about 3.5km/s of delta-V between LEO and Mars aerocapture. It's around 9.4km/s from launchpad to LEO, and 3.8km/s from Mars surface to LMO. And we have nothing else capable of delivering the TWR. Not even the nuclear engines.
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The thrust for an engine is a question of the amount of propellant you move out the back. The flow rate of a nuclear rocket taking off from the surface of Mars is the same needed for a chemical rocket. A nuclear rocket would be much heavier and would make less sense for a surface launch system.
If a Mars mission used a nuclear rocket it would be better to leave that in orbit and use the lighter chemical rockets for the surface return part of the mission. A staged chemical rocket returns the payload (astronau
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But that single stage is exactly what some nuclear rocket designs allow. Not ridiculous at all; and reminder Mar's gravity is only 3/8 that of Earth.
We should stop farting around with chemical rockets, they're puny.
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nuclear rockets can eject their propellants with much more energy than a chemical rocket
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Nuclear rockets assembled, made critical and fired in orbit are clearly the superior way to make round trips to other planets.
Which is great, as long as you don't need to actually go down to the surface.
Remember, this is for taking off from the surface, perhaps to rendezvous with the nuclear rocket.
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Not needed. Going to surface of Mars or moon of Jupiter with nuclear rocket, and then blasting off, would be fine.
CO (Score:1)
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I do not think that we have to worry for that yet:
Mass of the Martian Atmosphere (mostly CO2) = 25,000,000,000,000 kg
Mass of the CO produced by the MOXIE experiment in 1 hour = 0.012 kg = 12 g
For the future Mars mission, the plan is to have a bigger device capable of transforming 3kg of CO2 into 1kg of O2 + 2 kg of CO per hour during a full year. At that rate, it would take 950 millions years to transform the whole Martian atmosphere. It is also worth noting that if a mass scale production was attempted the
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CO is too highly reactive for this to be a problem. It will disappear by combining with other elements in the environment.
Awesome! (Score:1)
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The device took about an hour to produce nearly enough oxygen that a human not doing anything under heavy exertion would have used up in about 10 minutes.
There's still a long way to go.
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It was a proof-of-concept device. Why would they have bothered shipping enough mass for industrial grade O2 production for a preliminary test?
Maybe the next one can be part of an ISRU fuel generator and storage depot.
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It's easy, it just takes time. First, we put a small oxygen generator on Mars. Then we wait a million years for an intelligent civilization to develop. Eventually, they will make rockets and come to Earth!
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The device took about an hour to produce nearly enough oxygen that a human not doing anything under heavy exertion would have used up in about 10 minutes.
There's still a long way to go.
This looks like an opportunity to use math.
If one device produces enough oxygen in an hour for 10 minutes breathing, how many of these devices would it take to produce an hour's worth or oxygen every hour? I don't know because math is too hard!
So I came up with another idea. We need two devices! Because we embiggen the device six times to meet our needs.
Plus one for backup.