Rover Perseverance continues to make history on Mars. In the last days an autonomous helicopter carried by the vehicle managed to make the first flight from an aircraft on another planet.
Now, the Rover Perseverance has broken yet another paradigm. It was the first vehicle sent to Mars to remove oxygen separately from other gases in the planet's atmosphere.
According to NASA, this advance may allow rockets to be refueled on Mars in the future to return to Earth. The red planet's atmosphere is composed mainly of carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen (N2) and argon (ar).
However, there are traces of oxygen and methane in Mars' atmosphere. With these two elements it is possible to generate the necessary combustion for the propulsion of a rocket.
SpaceX's Starship interplanetary rocket was once designed to use a Liquid Methane (lCH4) and Liquid Oxygen (lO2) solution for propulsion.
Such devices could also one day provide breathing air for astronauts themselves, in a kind of manned Mars station, on the planet's soil.
An experimental instrument, the size of a toaster, on board Perseverance, called Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), accomplished the task of separating the molecule and isolating the oxygen. The test took place on April 20, the rover's 60th Martian day on the red planet.
MOXIE works by separating oxygen atoms from carbon dioxide molecules, which are made up of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms.
In this first operation, the MOXIE's oxygen production was quite modest, around 5 grams, equivalent to about 10 minutes of breathable oxygen for an astronaut. The MOXIE is designed to generate up to 10 grams of oxygen per hour.
The conversion process requires high levels of heat to reach a temperature of approximately 800 degrees Celsius, so a lot of energy is needed to carry out this process. For now, Rover Perseverance has an excellent radioisotope energy generation system, basically nuclear energy.
