A new plasma-based system could help decrease the cost of creating oxygen on mars - by AndyTomaswick
UT interview with Dr. Michael Hecht – one of the inventors of MOXIE.
In practice, the MOXIE system requires large, cumbersome heaters and pumps to force the necessary environmental conditions on an atmosphere that typically lies far outside those values. And, as with all things in space exploration, those pieces of large, cumbersome equipment come at a significantly increased cost in terms of the mass needed to get off of Earth.
While Perseverance’s MOXIE experiment was a success, scaling it up would be challenging, requiring 25 kW of power to create enough oxygen to support only two astronauts. That is equivalent to slightly less than what the average power an American household uses in a day – and that power consumption is strictly just to create breathable oxygen.
Other problems abound, from fouling of the electrolysis cell with the carbon that is the other by-product of this reaction, to the likelihood of Martian dust clogging the intake pumps. There are so many known problems with MOXIE that NASA recently invested in at NIAC program that would try to eliminate some of them.But a new paper utilizes an entirely different approach.
Those decisions can result in more than just a standard oxygen-generating machine. Plasma-based oxygen creation systems could be made small enough to be portable by an individual astronaut, allowing them to walk in the Martian atmosphere without needing to carry around a potentially explosive O2 tank. In addition, different types of plasma and gas configurations could result in nitrogen fixation techniques that could be critical to any future farming on the red planet.
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