Massachusetts Institute Of Technology To Test Making Oxygen On Mars

One of the main goals of the Mars 2020 mission will be to determine the potential habitability of the planet for human visitors, researchers said.

The MOXIE instrument will attempt to make oxygen out of native resources in order to demonstrate that it could be done on a larger scale for future missions.

MOXIE will be designed and built as what Hecht calls a "fuel cell run in reverse." In a normal fuel cell, fuel is heated together with an oxidiser - often oxygen - producing electricity.

In this case, however, electricity produced by a separate machine would be combined with carbon dioxide from the Martian air to produce oxygen and carbon monoxide in a process called solid oxide electrolysis.

"It's a pretty exotic way to run a fuel cell on Earth, but on Mars if you want to run an engine, you don't have oxygen. Over 75 percent of what you would have to carry to run an engine on Mars would be oxygen," Hecht said.

Setting up a system to create oxygen that human explorers could breathe would be extremely helpful for a mission of any duration. But there's an equally important reason to be able to produce oxygen onsite.

"When we send humans to Mars, we will want them to return safely, and to do that they need a rocket to lift off the planet. That's one of the largest pieces of the mass budget that we would need to send astronauts there and back. So if we can eliminate that piece by making the oxygen on Mars, we're way ahead of the game," Hecht said.

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