Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the attention to the shimmering red presence within the clear night sky.
Mars has had an effect on us as far back as we’ve knowledge of humans, and it’ll still be as we move closer to the primary human steps on this strange planet. With the growing population and the depletion of major resources on our planet, the second phase of colonization has became the hot topic of every cosmos lover.
Mars has always been treated as the second home for humanity due to the considerable distance and looks like composition of the constituent organs and thereby each and every space organization is looking to step up the race to be the first to initiate rehabilitation on Mars.
Mars has skilled various stages of experiments because it has been flown by, orbited, smacked into, radar examined, and rocketed onto, also as bounced upon, rolled over, shoveled, drilled into, baked and even blasted. Still, one of the major issues is Mars being stepped on.
One of the major problems is that Mars is still not compatible to be colonized due to the atmospheric composition and the ultimate absence of Oxygen, which is somewhat the life support of humanity.
This leads to the rise of one common question i.e., How can NASA produce Oxygen on Mars? And organisations and scientists are dedicating decades to unravelling this mystery to make Earth look like a planet.
Read: Does Mars have oxygen to breathe?
NASA’S Perseverance Rover- A knight on duty
In pursuit of these questions, NASA led out his infamous Knight to give us some information that will enable us to understand the complexity and stature of what is lacking and what can we do to make it a secondary habitat for us.
NASA’s Mars Exploration Program has been systematically trying to seek out with its various missions and programs that have Spirit and Opportunity rovers which showed that liquid water once existed on the surface.
Furthermore, building on that discovery, NASA’s Curiosity rover dedicated itself to finding conditions on Mars approx. 4 billion years ago could have supported life as we all know it. In addition to the trials, Perseverance will directly look and search for signs of the past or any life on Mars.
Perseverance launched on 30 July 2020 midriff the additional challenge of the global COVID-19 pandemic. On 18 February 2021, it landed in Jezero crater, the location of an ancient lake and river delta. From there, the rover searched for microbial fossils in rocks that formed in Mars’ warm, wet past. Its major concern is to look for carbon-containing molecules called organics that form the building blocks and fundamentals of life on Earth.
Ever since 1976, NASA has directly looked for life on Mars, when the twin Viking landers performed long-shot chemistry experiments that turned up inconclusive results.
Also read: How will NASA return samples from Mars?
MOXIE: the oracle of Perseverance Rover
NASA’s Perseverance rover created a glimpse of a breathable earth atmosphere like air on Mars.
One of the experimental organs on the rover deduced the carbon dioxide molecules into their constituent particles thereby formulating about 10 minutes’ worth of breathable oxygen and considered to be enough oxygen to make tiny pocket amounts of rocket fuel.
Which Organ of the knight did this miracle?
The supplemental organ on the rover known as MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) is quite similar to the size of a toaster.
The major function of it is to deduce oxygen atoms off carbon dioxide, which is the primary participant of Mars’ atmosphere. “We breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen.” says primal investigator Michael Hecht of MIT.
MOXIE departs to Mars on Perseverance and thereby arrives on the Red Planet on February 18. On April 20, the instrument heated to around 800° Celsius and stayed long enough to supply five grams of oxygen but wasn’t enough to breathe for a very long duration.
Since the main reason for making oxygen on Mars wasn’t for breathing, as Hecht mentioned, it had been for formulating fuel for the return journey to Earth.
Since the most reason to make oxygen on Mars wasn’t for breathing, As Hecht mentioned, it had been for formulating fuel for the return journey to Earth.
“When we burn anything, gas within the car or a log within the fireplace, most of what we’re burning is oxygen,” Hecht says. On Earth, we take all that oxygen without any consideration. “It’s free here. We don’t think about it.”
In the near future, astronauts will have to either bring oxygen with them or compose it on Mars. Therefore, a rocket powerful enough to lift a few astronauts off the Planet’s surface would require around 25 metric tons of oxygen, which in turns a ginormous amount to carry along for the journey from Earth to Mars.
Also read: What will the first human settlement on Mars be like?
Invention of the Decade
MOXIE is considered as the invention of the decade which served the purpose and enlightened us with the first step towards the future infrastructure on Mars. Moxie may be a prototype for the device astronauts could use to form rocket propellant in the future.
When processing at full power, this instrument can create about 10 grams of oxygen per hour. The instrument, powered by Perseverance, will run about one Martian day at a time. A scaled-up version could run continuously for 26 months before astronauts arrive, Hecht says.
MOXIE cannot process continuously because Perseverance needs to divert and alter its power back to its other instruments to continue its science mission of searching for signs of past life on Mars. MOXIE will get an opportunity to process a minimum of ninefold more over subsequent Martian year (about two Earth years).
The success of the technology could set the stage for a permanent research station on Mars, like the McMurdo station in Antarctica, where everyone is waiting to witness it with their own eyes i.e., the move of the entire century and the first to have a historical perspective on Mars.
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