Martian Rocket Fuel?

Michael Hecht of MIT's Haystack Observatory will lead development of the MOXIE instrument that will fly on the Mars 2020 mission.

An oxygen factory 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. To that end, 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.

To do this, 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 oxidizer - 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 (abstract).

'It's a pretty exotic way to run a fuel cell on Earth,' Hecht says, '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.'"

Hi Fredski,

I really don't like this kind of post. Is there a question or a comment you want to make?

then pass it over, I'm not here to entertain you

Fine, I'm not going to read the entire post to figure out the one-sentence summary you could have made to get me interested to have a discussion.

This thread is marked as a discussion, not a question.

Hi Fredski,

I enjoy this kind of post. I'm glad you don't cloud your discussion threads with a bunch of questions or comments right off the bat.

(There! Now we have balance.)