A Step by Step Guide on How to Create Oxygen on Mars

Just a few days ago, on April 20th, NASA did something that seems from the realms of science fiction. No, it wasn’t the first Ingenuity flight. That was on April 19th. And no, it wasn’t the second Ingenuity flight. That was on April 22nd. It was the first time we have ever created oxygen on Mars.

MOXIE

To do this, scientists at JPL and NASA developed the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment or MOXIE for short. MOXIE’s main purpose is to produce oxygen at least 98% purity at a rate of 6 to 10 grams per hour. MOXIE is designed to meet these requirements at all times of day and even in dust storms, which are very common on Mars. MOXIE was one of the experiments that were on board Perseverance.

MOXIE is built off of an earlier experiment, Mars In-situ propellant production Precursor (MIP), which was supposed to fly aboard the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander mission. This experiment was supposed to use electrolysis of carbon dioxide. However, this mission was canceled and the project was terminated. The project was then later revived for the 2020 Mars Rover Mission and was developed mainly by MIT and JPL.

MOXIE's First Production Test

To generate oxygen, MOXIE first acquires, compresses, and heats the gases in Mars’s atmosphere using tools like a HEPA filter, scroll composer, and other heaters. In fact, MOXIE heats up to approximately 800 °C. Mar’s atmosphere is mostly made up of carbon dioxide. What the MOXIE does is split the carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. To split the carbon dioxide molecule, MOXIE uses solid oxide electrolysis and combines O atoms to form gaseous oxygen, O2. The net reaction, in the end, is  2CO2 → 2CO + O2. Other gases such as nitrogen and argon go through MOXIE without any chemical changes.

MOXIE is a very important machine for the future of Mars exploration for many reasons. Oxygen is very important for space travel. Not only do humans need it to breathe, but it is a key ingredient in rocket fuel. A rocket must have more oxygen by weight to burn its fuel. For example, trying to get 4 astronauts of the Martian surface would take 7 metric tons of fuel and 25 metric tons of oxygen. Now, transporting these to Mars would be very expensive because you require more fuel the heavier your rocket weighs. NASA hopes to use a larger and more powerful MOXIE unit on future crewed Mars missions.

Going back to the test on April 20th, MOXIE created about 5 grams of oxygen. This is equivalent to someone breathing for 10 minutes on Mars. While this isn’t much, the demonstration on the 19th was to make sure MOXIE was still working. NASA hopes for nine more demonstrations over the course of one Mars year (about 2 Earth years). If the whole MOXIE demonstration is a success, we will have solved one of the major problems with sending humans to Mars.

Sources:

“Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Apr. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Oxygen_ISRU_Experiment. 

Potter, Sean. “NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover Extracts First Oxygen from Red Planet.” NASA, NASA, 21 Apr. 2021, www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-perseverance-mars-rover-extracts-first-oxygen-from-red-planet.