Massachusetts Institute Of Technology To Test Making Oxygen On Mars
WASHINGTON: An MIT oxygen-creating instrument will fly on the upcoming Mars 2020 mission to study how to make oxygen out of the Martian atmosphere. NASA has announced the seven instruments that will accompany Mars 2020, a planned $1.9 billion roving laboratory similar to the Mars Curiosity rover currently cruising the Red Planet.
Key among these instruments is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-led payload known as MOXIE, which will play a leading role in paving the way for human exploration of our ruddy planetary neighbour.
MOXIE - short for Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment - was selected from 58 instrument proposals submitted by research teams around the world.
The experiment, currently scheduled to launch in the summer of 2020, is a specialized reverse fuel cell whose primary function is to consume electricity in order to produce oxygen on Mars, where the atmosphere is 96 percent carbon dioxide.
If proven to work on the Mars 2020 mission, a MOXIE-like system could later be used to produce oxygen on a larger scale, both for life-sustaining activities for human travellers and to provide liquid oxygen needed to burn the rocket fuel for a return trip to Earth.
"Human exploration of Mars will be a seminal event for the next generation, the same way the Moon landing mission was for my generation," said Michael Hecht, principal investigator of the MOXIE instrument and assistant director for research management at the MIT Haystack Observatory.
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