NASA’s Gold Box Will Make Oxygen on Mars

The Martian atmosphere is ninety five percent carbon dioxide, about a few percent nitrogen, a few percent argon, trace amounts of everything else. But there’s still a lot of CO2, and so that’s probably the most abundant resource on Mars other than dirt. CO2 has oxygen bound in it. And if we can liberate that oxygen from some of that CO2, then we can use it to do something useful. The goal is to pave the way for future human exploration of Mars by demonstrating the ability to generate oxygen. That's where the magic happens is inside that box. NASA is set to launch its next rover to the red planet in 2020. Stacked inside are seven science instruments, six of which are focused on sample analysis like this SuperCam and a spectrometer called PIXL that’ll measure chemical signatures inside Martian rocks. And this box getting lowered inside the belly of the rover is MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. It’s got an agenda separate from the others, and that’s to make oxygen on Mars for the first time. Well, at least in real life. In the Martian, there was something that was called the oxygenator. If the oxygenator breaks, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks, I’ll die of thirst. So we jokingly refer to MOXIE as the oxygenator. It's unclear in the movie what technology the oxygenator is actually using, but it's very likely that it would be something like MOXIE but scaled up. MOXIE uses a technology called solid oxide electrolysis. It works a lot like a reverse fuel cell where instead of putting in a fuel and getting electricity out, we can put electricity in and electrolytes and basically get a fuel and an oxidizer out. On the outside the rover, we have a small box with a filter. The filter is to make sure that we don't draw in any dust from the Martian atmosphere into our system, because the next thing in the path is a scroll compressor. The scroll compressor takes this low pressure Martian gas from the atmosphere and compresses it and brings it up to something closer to Earth's atmospheric pressure. Because the next thing that we do is we run it into this thing. We call this our solid oxide electrolysis stack and it is basically a layer cake of a bunch of metal plates, which are the dark green things. And then these light colored layers are thin ceramic cells that have particular chemical properties where at high temperature, they can conduct electricity using oxygen as the charged carrier. We heat this guy up to about eight hundred degrees Celsius. You have oxygen ions on one side and you apply a voltage, then you can selectively dry the oxygen through the ceramic membrane and separate it out from whatever's on the other side. It goes through a set of sensors very much like these sitting here on the table in front of me. And we measure what fraction of CO2 is there. We put CO2 in here. Oxygen comes out here. And the waste product, which is a mixture of CO and carbon monoxide and unreacted CO2 comes out here. It’s gold because we were concerned that MOXIE itself would run hotter than everything else around it. And we wanted to make sure we didn’t impact any of the nearby electronics boxes inside the rover. And so, gold has very low emissivity, so it doesn’t radiate heat effectively. This particular chemistry process is sort of unique to Mars in its applicability, and also the packaging and how we actually build this system to survive launch and get to Mars. No one has ever done anything like this. MOXIE is going to make about six grams per hour of oxygen. It's not very much. It's about enough to keep a small dog alive. We don't have the resources available on the rover to run MOXIE for long periods of time continuously because a lot of the rover energy has to be used for other science that they want to do. We will probably run MOXIE at roughly once every two months. The goal for us is to sample different environmental conditions on Mars. So day versus night, summer versus winter, dust storm versus not dust storm...to assess how the technology behaves in response to these changing environmental conditions. What might happen in the future really depends on the technology that NASA decides to go with on Mars. If you're assumption is that you only have the CO2 in the atmosphere available, then you'd have something like MOXIE scaled up by about a factor of two hundred. You'd launch it and deliver it to Mars about two years before humans set foot there. It would have a bunch of supporting equipment like a power system and a storage system, and it would sit for two years and just generate oxygen and collect it, and then it would be ready for use by the humans when they show up two years later. It's really exciting for me to be able to build something that's going to land on another planet. I hope that it's gonna work the way we expect it to. And that paves the way for future human exploration in the not too distant future.

Channel: Seeker

Views: 1,459,549

Rating: 4.9343977 out of 5

Keywords: focal point, documentary, interview, short doc, science news, explainer, technology, tech, seeker documentary, seeker, space, jet propulsion laboratory, science, mars, jpl, nasa questions, the martian, Matt damon, Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, moxie, the red planet, planet, carbon dioxide, carbon-dioxide, co2, new tech, solid oxide electrolysis, rover, mars mission, mars mission 2020, supercam, spectrometer, pixl, martian rocks, engineer, engineers, oxygen, space exploration

Id: UkQHCSZQvv0

Length: 5min 30sec (330 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/StickSauce]

That was cooler than I thought it was going to be when I clicked it. So striping carbon from co2 to extra t oxygen. Scale this shit up!

[u/raresaturn]

Awesome

[u/BrawlFan_1]

Getting Martian MAV vibes

[u/felixmariotto]

Cool, but there is an issue.

Whatever our efforts to make human life possible on Mars, its surface will ever be bombarded by cosmic rays because it has no magnetic field. The only possible protection on Mars would be to live under a THICK layer of soil. Do you want to live in a cave ? Few people do, we like to see sun light. Speaking of sun light, it's rare on Mars. This also will never change whatever our efforts : it's farther from the sun than earth, and it has nothing in-situ to produce energy. Most of it must come from earth. Another unsolvable issue : lack of gravity is a problem for humans, it's proven.

Venus on another hand, is a much more realistic target for colonies. It is the closest planet to Earth. It is protected from cosmic rays. It is the same size as Earth, so gravity is the same. It is closer to the sun than Earth, so energy is abundant. Lastly, at 50km above the surface, the air pressure is 1bar, and the temperature 70°C. Venus at 50km above the surface is the most similar place to the Earth in the whole solar system, and it's also one of the closest (closer than Mars, again). There is very serious projects of buoyant colonies in the sky of Venus, I urge you to look it up.