Don't expect to breathe this O2—instead, it could help launch future rockets off Mars.
A trip to Mars will be difficult, to say the least. Although human spaceflight has become a regular occurrence in near-Earth space in recent decades, leaving our gravitational pull takes a lot of rocket power. And then leaving a planet like Mars to return to Earth will also take a lot of oomph.
“It’s really difficult, if not impossible, to design a human Mars mission that doesn’t use in situ resources,” says, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center who was not involved in the project, using the scientific term for “on site.” The device can produce 6 to 10 grams per hour, depending on atmospheric conditions. It set that production maximum rate at the end of August, Hoffman says, when the Martian atmosphere was densest.
Then, the carbon dioxide is heated up to about 1,500° F . Once heated, it’s time for the main event: A run through the electrolysis unit, which uses electricity to drive a chemical reaction. In there, the carbon dioxide encounters catalysts, like nickel, which cause the CO2 molecule to dissociate into carbon monoxide and an oxygen ion. Then electricity is used to pull oxygen ions through a filter into another chamber, where they combine into oxygen molecules.
A rate of 6 to 10 grams an hour, however, will not produce nearly enough oxygen to be useful for a human mission to Mars. The average human breathes a little less than 1 kilogram of oxygen each day, Hoffman says, and rockets are even hungrier for O2. It will take tens or even hundreds of tons of oxygen to power a rocket that can launch people off the surface of Mars. But that oxygen can be accumulated over time.
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