If you are among the millions of people who have been following NASA Perseverance rover’s first week on Mars, you've no doubt seen the dramatic POV video of its landing and some of the stark, high-resolution photos it's taken on the planet's surface. But in addition to hi-tech camera's, there are also numerous experiments aboard.
While the rover's primary mission is to search for signs of life in Mars' distant past, one of those experiments — led by research scientist Michael Hecht from MIT’s Haystack Observatory in Westford — is squarely focussed on Mars' future. And it could pave the way for humans to finally step foot on the red planet's surface in the near future.
"We hope to be on Mars in 15 or 20 years," said Hecht. "But there is a little work we have to do before that to get ready."
Hecht is the principle investigator for MOXIE, one of the seven scientific instruments aboard the Perseverance rover — one he says is poised to take on a crucial chunk of that work by solving a nagging payload problem.
"We can’t practically bring with us everything that we need," said Hecht of future human missions to Mars. "We’re trying to alleviate some of that burden by taking some of the bigger and heavier stuff and actually making it on Mars."
Among the "bigger and heavier stuff" is a pretty essential item: oxygen. Tons of it will be needed — both for astronauts to breath on Mars and liquified as rocket fuel to get them home. MOXIE’s trick is to literally pull that oxygen out of thin Martian air.
"What we’ve got to work with is a very thin atmosphere of almost entirely carbon dioxide," said Hecht of the Martian air.
And while carbon dioxide is not all that good for breathing, it does — as the name suggests — contain two atoms of oxygen in every molecule.
"If people saw [the movie] The Martian, there was a device called the oxygenator that turns CO2 from the Martian air into oxygen," said Hecht.
MOXIE, an acronym for Mars Oxgen In Situ Experiment (and, yes, also a nod to the most famous sweet/bitter soft drink ever produced in nearby Lowell) is, essentially, a first crack at a real-life oxygenator; a bit of science fiction that Hecht hopes is about to become science fact.
"Things like this are done on earth but, nothing remotely like this has ever been done on Mars," he said.
How will they pull it off?
"One of the things you need to know about the Martian atmosphere, it has a lot of dust," said MIT doctoral student and MOXIE team reseracher Maya Nasr. "So, the first step in our process is to really try to filter out the dust from the air that we suck in."
Martian air is also incredibly low pressure, which makes it difficult to do what MOXIE is aiming to do.
"So we’re trying to compress it to a way higher pressure," said Nasr.
So MOXIE will have to perform SOXE, an acronym for Solid Oxide Electrolysis.
"This process is the actual chemical process that takes the carbon dioxide and removes the oxygen out of it," explained Nasr.
Then, they'll carefully measure everything. How much oxygen did they extract? How pure is it? How much carbon monoxide is left as a byproduct? From there, since MOXIE is just a proof of concept, they will release their catch back into the wild.
At this stage, MOXIE can only produce about enough oxygen to keep a small dog alive for a short time, but Hecht says what they learn will be crucial as scientists build future versions that can make it by the ton. The plan is for MOXIE to "make" oxygen 10 times over the course of the coming year under a variety of weather conditions (yes, Mars has weather, too). Its first run is expected to come sometime in the next three weeks.
"MOXIE is a demonstration to show that this can be practically done on Mars, remotely, from back here on Earth," said Hecht.
And, hey, what could be more 2021 than working remotely?
