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The NASA Perseverance rover's MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Experiment) employs electrolysis to separate Martian carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen. The current MOXIE is built to run for brief periods, starting up and shutting down with each run, depending on the rover's exploration schedule and mission tasks.
MOXIE uses electrolysis to "inhale" CO2 on Mars and "exhale" CO and Oxygen.
It is the first demonstration of the processing of in situ resources for human use in another world.
Currently, the Martian atmosphere is in no way hospitable to humans. It is formed primarily of carbon dioxide and is over 100 times less dense than Earth's atmosphere.
However, that might change as this modest device, about the size of a suitcase, has been consistently extracting breathable oxygen from the Martian atmosphere on that sandy, arid, alien world, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said in its latest press release.
In order to manufacture breathing air for a human expedition to the red planet, it is the first demonstration of the processing of in situ resources for human use in another world.
The NASA Perseverance rover's MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Experiment) employs electrolysis to separate Martian carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen.
In order to do this, it draws in Martian air and passes it through a filter to remove any impurities. In the Solid Oxide Electrolyzer (SOXE), a device created and manufactured by OxEon Energy, the compressed air is split into oxygen ions and carbon monoxide by electrochemical reactions.
The oxygen ions are then separated and united again to create breathable molecular oxygen, or O2, which MOXIE then analyses for quantity and purity before harmlessly releasing it back into the atmosphere together with carbon monoxide and other atmospheric gases.
As per the researchers, MOXIE produced oxygen seven times as much between February 2021, when Perseverance arrived, and the end of 2021.
“This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body, and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission,” MIT said in its press release.
The current MOXIE is built to run for brief periods, starting up and shutting down with each run, depending on the rover's exploration schedule and mission tasks. It is compact by design to fit within the Perseverance rover. A complete oxygen factory, based on the same principles, however, would include larger units that would ideally ran continually.
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