NASA’s Mars Rover Sets New Oxygen Creation Record

With NASA’s future plans of landing humans on Mars and transporting them to and from the planet, one of the most important challenges is the lack of air. There is less than 1% of air on Mars as there is on Earth, and carbon dioxide makes up about 96% of it on Mars. While not ideal, this does present an opportunity to turn that CO2 into oxygen.

A few years ago when the Perseverance Rover landed on the Martian surface, it not only began its main purpose related to sample collection but also creating oxygen. It does this using MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. Just recently, researchers pushed MOXIE to a maximum production level — a factor of two higher than reached earlier.

This was able to produce a substantial amount of oxygen compared to previous tests. With this, the agency is more confident in what the future holds as they continue to develop this technology. Here I will go more in-depth into this new milestone, the MOXIE payload, what to expect in the coming months, and more.

Credit:

Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
0:56 - New Oxygen Test
3:36 - MOXIE Overview

[pipersall]

Good topic. I hadnt heard too much about that experiment and how it was doing. Thank you for your report.

[antonnym]

There is a very large relict glacier of water ice, covered with dust to keep it from sublimating. It is located at the far western end of Valles Marineris in a region called Noctis Labyrinthus. You don't have to go to the poles for water, because this glacier is at 6 degrees south latitude, and it is big. By that, I mean 8.6 cubic miles of ice or 8.7 trillion gallons of water; almost exactly the same size as Lake Meade at the Hoover Dam.

[madchad]

The Space Bucket puts out some of the best info among all the space channels - delving into subjects almost no one else does, and the associated videos are really good too! Great job, great docvid!👍

[Geekofarm]

While a crew-sized MOXIE might be the size of a fridge, the 25kW power plant needed to run it the equivalent of 24hrs a day is going to be considerably bigger. That's about 500m2 of "ideal" solar panel, or eight of the largest RTG nuclear power packs ever constructed (which weigh about a tonne each). A Mars outpost might be a good place to use beamed solar power.

[kavilesh]

Im addicted to read your blog articles. on mars..its worth to make one article per week.thanks

[antonnym]

I can't help but thinking if we're using pure oxygen, we'll have to have either lower pressure, like 5psi, or bring in some of that Martian Nitrogen as a moderator to help bring up the air pressure for better breathability. I'm sure Hect and the team are aware of that. It is important to point out that the oxygen being harvested at the point of electrical separation is monatomic. The bad news is we can't breathe monatomic oxygen. The good news is that Oxygen is highly reactive and single atoms don't hang around very long. They will immediately (If not sooner) combine with other Oxygen atoms to form the O2 we all know and love to breathe. The better news is that there is nothing to stop us from scaling the MOXIE reactor up and send multiple units for redundancy, and such an arrangement will take care of the needs of the outpost or colony. The big challenge is how energy intensive it is to heat the CO2 to 1472°F, but that is very doable with small modular reactors. All good wishes.

[philflip]

Ice, (frozen water) from the poles is cited as an alternative raw material for oxygen production but of course frozen carbon dioxide is also present at the poles. Both fuelstocks are therefore aavailiable at the poles in greater abundance/concentration but fuelstocks in solid form would be less convenient in that require aditional equipment to convey them to the oxygen generator.
Thanks for the coverage of a neglected topic.

It’s sad that most of the public have no clue that Moxie is the single most important scientific package on the rover. Tell me Elon isn’t paying attention.

[SethiozProject]

one thing i don't get, everyone keeps talking about colonize mars and generating breathable oxygen, but nobody talks about the fact that mars has only 30% of earth's gravity, which means if you spend few years on mars, you wouldn't really be able to come back to earth as you'd collapse.

[MyKharli]

It just proved how impractical a human colony on mars is

[thehumancanary]

12 grams/hour! Humans need around a kilogram of oxygen per day each!! That's 83 hours of MOXIE production for 1 human's need for 1 day.

[duncangarnett]

When I think of oxygen generators, I think of the atmosphere processing plant in the 'Aliens' movie.

[julianfp]

How difficult would it be to utilise the carbon atoms that Moxy presumably has left over after the oxygen molecules are stripped off? As mentioned by a few others water might be easier to access than this video suggests which also potentially brings the Sabatier process or something similar into play.

Sabatier, as I understand it, breaks water into O2 and H2 and then takes CO2 (from respiration in the ISS case) plus the H2 from the water and some extra H2 added from an H2 supply tank to get back H2O and create CH4. If an abundant source of water could be found then I'm wondering whether both Moxy and Sabatier could be creating that very precious O2 and the other product of Moxy (carbon) plus the other product of the Sabatier process (hydrogen) be combined into CH4 which is the other propellant needed by Starship so also very useful to be generating on Mars.

Having both Moxy and Sabatier producing Oxygen could give useful redundancy and increase the volume of oxygen production but I'm wondering whether Moxy's output of unbound carbon atoms might allow for more energy-efficient subsequent binding with hydrogen to create CH4 vs the final stage of the Sabatier process where the carbon is coming from CO2 so needs to be stripped of its Oxygen atoms first, something that the Moxy process has already done.

[jeffmosesjr]

Mars does not have "air" air is a generalized term for the atmosphere of earth. Mars has a yet unnamed atmosphere.

[snekmeseht]

It is not "creating" oxygen. It is doing chemistry.

[gregoriancatmonk]

Isn't there cystals the University of Southern Denmark that can capture and store oxygen? It seems those crystals would be something NASA could use to store oxygen created by this rover to use in the future. The crystals would weight much less than O2 tanks as a storage medium.

[michaeldunne]

Fantastic pilot / experiment. Alright, 12 grams an hour isn't much (from ~ 100 watts of power), but a start to proofing out the concept of "living off the land" (which figures like Robert Zubrin theorized about from the early 1990s). A 2, 500 watt powerplant would be easily possible with a compact nuclear reactor - for the venerable TRIGA research reactors, they have "thermal power levels from less than 0.1 to 16 megawatts" ...

[favesongslist]

Exciting report, One step closer to humans on Mars.

[kalleh]

Maybe it would be smart to leave the moxy to landing gear what the rower came down like the Chinese did so it can run operations 24/7

[AtomicExtremophile]

So, presumably, the process means that there's carbon left over. What are they going to do with it?