Moxie and only Moxie

SpaceNut · 2020-03-15 08:08:54

Moxie is an important part to man's survival as it requires no light only power and mars air to be able to create the air we will breath.
The second part of this is we can use it for cabin air processing.
The ouput exhaust of co can also be reused so as to not lose the effective energy used in drawing in the co2 from mars air as it can be repurposed for the RGWS to leave as little resources as possible to go back to mars.

SpaceNut · 2020-05-25 18:00:22

tahanson43206 wrote:

This post is to thank Void for finding and showing an Oxygen separation system that uses solid state components.
The post itself is:
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 80#p168480
This one could be a thing I have wanted for some time:
https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/LEW-TOPS-85
Pressurized Oxygen via Solid Oxide Electrolysis
Small, simple device produces pure, dry, pressurized oxygen
Because of the current virus epidemic on Earth, I've been interested in attempts to clean air before allowing it into the lungs of humans.
The announcement quoted by Void does say the system could be used in a portable breathing apparatus (a space suit)
Originally conceived as a method to generate pressurized pure oxygen for extravehicular activity (EVA) suits worn on the International Space Station, Glenn's technology represents a significant breakthrough.
The apparatus would (presumably) still need some kind of supplementary pumping mechanism (I would imagine) to circulate air in a space suit, or a hazmat suit on Earth.
(th)

https://sbir.nasa.gov/content/solid-oxi … rolyzers-0
https://sbir.nasa.gov/content/solid-oxi … rolyzers-1
https://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/content/fuel … plications
https://www.nasa.gov/spacetech/strg/2013_xue.html

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009J … E/abstract
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/isru9 … RIDHAR.PDF
OXYGEN PRODUCTION ON MARS USING SOLID OXIDE ELECTROLYSIS. K. R. Sridhar

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/videos/?v=417
Crazy Engineering: Making Oxygen on Mars with MOXIE | Mars …

https://www.oxeonenergy.com/moxie
The NASA Mars 2020 mission will land a Curiosity class rover on Mars with a set of seven new science instruments. One of these instruments, MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen ISRU

https://oxeonenergy.com/projects/redox- … ir-phase-2

SpaceNut · 2020-11-09 19:57:01

tahanson43206 wrote:

The Mars 2020 Convention video for November 5th (Earth time) is #4
The official playlist is available here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P … z9NgdtxDAF

Direct link to video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2V5KS_ … AF&index=7

I go a chance to watch the moxie taping and there are number issues for scaling the experimental unit sent to mars and the reality of what can be delivered...

SpaceNut · 2020-11-12 20:17:43

answer to mars dust

Mars’ atmosphere contains a large amount of dust that, if ingested by MOXIE, may contaminate the electrodes of the solid oxide electrolysis subsystem. MOXIE is protected from dust by a High-Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filter. However, as dust accumulates on the filter, the pressure drop across it will increase.

tahanson43206 · 2020-11-13 06:12:39

For SpaceNut re #29

Thanks for the clarification of the nature of the problem for MOXIE at Mars, and the first cut at a solution.

I think that dynamic filters are called for. Graphene is (as I understand it) capable of filtering salt molecules from water molecules due to size alone, so I would expect it can block physical dust particles on Mars. A sheet of Graphene could be rotated across an entry port for atmosphere so that dust particles collect on the exterior surface, and then those particles could be blown off the screen at an exit port. The trick would be to achieve an efficiency of at least 50%, because some of the clean gas would be needed to blow the dust off the filter surface.

Another possibility (as I think about it) would be to blow dust off the surface of the moving filter surface from ** above ** using outside air.

I'll bet the engineers working on the production version of MOXIE are going to be doing a ** lot ** of creative thinking to provide a clean inflow at Mars, for a year of duty making 25 tons of Oxygen.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2020-11-25 16:37:13

MOXIE could help future rockets launch off Mars

Launching a rocket off the surface of the Red Planet will require industrial quantities of oxygen, a crucial part of propellant: A crew of four would need about 55,000 pounds (25 metric tons) of it to produce thrust from 15,000 pounds (7 metric tons) of rocket fuel.
Powering this electrochemical conversion requires a lot of heat - about 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius). Because of those high temperatures, MOXIE, which is a little larger than a toaster, features a variety of heat-tolerant materials. Special 3D-printed nickel alloy parts help distribute the heat within the instrument, while superlight insulation called aerogel minimizes the power needed to keep it at operating temperatures.
The outside of MOXIE is coated in a thin layer of gold, which is an excellent reflector of infrared heat and keeps those blistering temperatures from radiating into other parts of Perseverance.
"MOXIE is designed to make about 6 to 10 grams of oxygen per hour - just about enough for a small dog to breathe,"
Hecht estimates that a full-scale MOXIE system on Mars might be a bit larger than a household stove and weigh around 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) - almost as much as Perseverance itself. Work is ongoing to develop a prototype for one in the near future.
The team expects to run MOXIE about 10 times over the course of one Mars year (two Earth years), allowing them to watch how well it works in varying seasons. The results will inform the design of future oxygen generators.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/

Calliban · 2020-11-25 19:35:40

The scroll compressors look like a promising technology for this application. Simple and robust, with a minimum of moving parts. Because the CO2 is so far beneath its critical temperature of 304K, very little compressor work will be needed to achieve high compression ratios. This should mean negligible heating and no need for an intercooler. None the less, Martian atmospheric pressure is so low that I think you will need an axial compressor to get the gas up to a pressure of 0.5 bar, say. It may be that the axial compressor can take the CO2 all the way from 0.01bar to 10bar, without intercooler. If not, then a scroll compressor would make a good second stage, after the axial compressor has boosted the gas pressure to some fraction of a bar.

SpaceNut · 2020-12-11 20:56:15

MOXIE Could Help Future Rockets Launch Off Mars

A crew of four would need about 55,000 pounds (25 metric tons) of it to produce thrust from 15,000 pounds (7 metric tons) of rocket fuel.
Powering this electrochemical conversion requires a lot of heat - about 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius). Because of those high temperatures, MOXIE, which is a little larger than a toaster, features a variety of heat-tolerant materials. Special 3D-printed nickel alloy parts help distribute the heat within the instrument, while superlight insulation called aerogel minimizes the power needed to keep it at operating temperatures. The outside of MOXIE is coated in a thin layer of gold, which is an excellent reflector of infrared heat and keeps those blistering temperatures from radiating into other parts of Perseverance.
"MOXIE is designed to make about 6 to 10 grams of oxygen per hour - just about enough for a small dog to breathe," said Asad Aboobaker, a MOXIE systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "A full-scale system geared to make (propellant for the flight home) would need to scale up oxygen production by about 200 times what MOXIE will create."
Hecht estimates that a full-scale MOXIE system on Mars might be a bit larger than a household stove and weigh around 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) - almost as much as Perseverance itself. Work is ongoing to develop a prototype for one in the near future.
The team expects to run MOXIE about 10 times over the course of one Mars year (two Earth years), allowing them to watch how well it works in varying seasons. The results will inform the design of future oxygen generators.

tahanson43206 · 2021-04-22 11:34:00

Here's a write up for the general public about the experiment ...

Morgan McFall-Johnsen 19 hours ago

https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-pe … gen-2021-4

(th)

kbd512 · 2021-04-22 14:57:57

SpaceNut,

Basically, they need to figure out how to land a full scale ISRU experiment as part of an actual "How Do We Survive Here?" package instead of merely satisfying intellectual curiosity. The problem is not, how do I almost provide enough O2 for a small dog to survive for a few minutes, it's "How do I continuously provide enough O2 for an entire crew of 6 to 12 people to survive by replacing all losses with a chemically clean output product, and how do I manufacture all of the required LOX oxidizer in time to return the crew to Earth 2 years after they arrive?" The lab scale experiments are the domain of labs. The engineering scale experiments are the domain of aerospace engineers who should only be interested in solving the problem with minimum weight / power / time / money. They already proved that the prototype operated in a simulated Mars atmosphere here on Earth, so the next logical step was developing a fully engineered prototype, so that that could be sent to Mars. Without being able to physically inspect the unit after operating it, I fail to see how much this could actually tell them about the ultimate feasibility of a full scale device, nor even how well the device works in a field environment.

Can this experiment measure how much dust contamination is present in the LOX?

Can this experiment measure how much dust contamination will clog up the intake and air filter or vacuum pumps?

Do you have a method of cleaning the air filter by back-flushing CO2 through the intake, piping, and pumps?

Can this experiment evaluate how much damage, if any, was done to the fuel cell by dust contamination not captured by the intake filter?

All of that is rather of important if you're going to run the LOX through a rocket engine, even one that only has to survive a few minutes of flight. If you can't answer all of those questions using the data from the field experiment, then the data can't inform any decisions about the requirements for a full scale device that has to process many tons of Martian atmosphere over the course of two years.

They have a gigantic vacuum chamber here on Earth where they can pump in simulated Mars atmosphere, with all known chemical constituents, complete with fine iron oxide and volcanic ash "dust", to see how well their complete full-scale system functions under realistic test conditions, as it would be required to do for an actual crewed mission, which should first be focused on merely keeping humans alive and returning them home, as any scientific curiosities satisfied after that point are merely a bonus. After you manage to do that, then you have to figure out how to put that machine on the surface of Mars and have it run in a more or less automated fashion, because that is what truly requires testing.

Oldfart1939 · 2021-04-22 15:44:16

Once again, it's a shame we don't have a "thumbs up" icon that we could use for such a valuable comment as in post #35.

Last edited by Oldfart1939 (2021-04-22 15:44:42)

RobertDyck · 2021-04-22 15:44:53

MOXIE was supposed to be on Mars 2001 Lander. That was supposed accompany Mars Odyssey orbiter. But the chassis was the same as Polar Lander which failed. It was put on hold until they figured out what went wrong. But they never did launch it, just forgotten. Then a group of scientists "discovered" it in storage, removed all engineering experiments and reconfigured/repurposed to become Phoenix. Policy by former administrator Dan Goldin was backups: if one mission failed, the experiments would be done by another. So MOXIE is an initial proof of concept experiment and 20 years overdue. But at least it got done. What you're asking for is next.

SpaceNut · 2021-04-22 15:59:57

The articles all gloss over how long it was on for, how many watts were actually drawn and to get the approximate 5 grams of oxygen when we were expecting it to produce 10 grams in an hour time frame.
The colleges did most of the design work for the unit and much is available its construction on the web.
This topic as it stands is a wiki as its stayed focus on the topic thus far but it can not save the documents on a server and a drop box will not work to save them so that we can link to them on our severs. Thats the issue for saving files and making a wiki....
I am wonder if we can make the old newmars wiki functional again as it looks like the marspedia with years of work for either to over come to bring it on line....

louis · 2021-04-22 16:00:52

I think they basically have what you desire but NASA seem to move at a snail's pace with no sense of urgency (not suprising perhaps since there is no prospect of NASA themselves landing anyone on Mars in the next 20 years).

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/en … index.html

kbd512 wrote:

SpaceNut,
Basically, they need to figure out how to land a full scale ISRU experiment as part of an actual "How Do We Survive Here?" package instead of merely satisfying intellectual curiosity. The problem is not, how do I almost provide enough O2 for a small dog to survive for a few minutes, it's "How do I continuously provide enough O2 for an entire crew of 6 to 12 people to survive by replacing all losses with a chemically clean output product, and how do I manufacture all of the required LOX oxidizer in time to return the crew to Earth 2 years after they arrive?" The lab scale experiments are the domain of labs. The engineering scale experiments are the domain of aerospace engineers who should only be interested in solving the problem with minimum weight / power / time / money. They already proved that the prototype operated in a simulated Mars atmosphere here on Earth, so the next logical step was developing a fully engineered prototype, so that that could be sent to Mars. Without being able to physically inspect the unit after operating it, I fail to see how much this could actually tell them about the ultimate feasibility of a full scale device, nor even how well the device works in a field environment.
Can this experiment measure how much dust contamination is present in the LOX?
Can this experiment measure how much dust contamination will clog up the intake and air filter or vacuum pumps?
Do you have a method of cleaning the air filter by back-flushing CO2 through the intake, piping, and pumps?
Can this experiment evaluate how much damage, if any, was done to the fuel cell by dust contamination not captured by the intake filter?
All of that is rather of important if you're going to run the LOX through a rocket engine, even one that only has to survive a few minutes of flight. If you can't answer all of those questions using the data from the field experiment, then the data can't inform any decisions about the requirements for a full scale device that has to process many tons of Martian atmosphere over the course of two years.
They have a gigantic vacuum chamber here on Earth where they can pump in simulated Mars atmosphere, with all known chemical constituents, complete with fine iron oxide and volcanic ash "dust", to see how well their complete full-scale system functions under realistic test conditions, as it would be required to do for an actual crewed mission, which should first be focused on merely keeping humans alive and returning them home, as any scientific curiosities satisfied after that point are merely a bonus. After you manage to do that, then you have to figure out how to put that machine on the surface of Mars and have it run in a more or less automated fashion, because that is what truly requires testing.

Last edited by louis (2021-04-22 16:01:26)

kbd512 · 2021-04-22 16:31:28

Robert,

My point was that the ultimate aim of the program is not to determine how well a lab scale experiment runs for a few brief moments on the surface of Mars. The silly thing has a backup supply of CO2 included with it. What was the point of that? Either you can or you can't run the device in a realistic surface environment. We have all the data and equipment to simulate the operating conditions here on Earth, so there was no point to running that particular experiment on the surface of Mars. That's exactly what JPL did to test their Mars drone. Wonder of wonders, the engineers reported that the flight characteristics were nearly identical to what they'd already tested here on Earth. Whether they ultimately crash it on Mars or not, they've proven the basic feasibility of flying a drone ahead of a rover to take detailed pictures of the terrain ahead so they can drive the rover to exactly where they want to explore after mapping a driving route from a single set of photos. Since it clearly works, the next mission should include a couple dozen drones with the rover. If you crash a few, it's not the end of the mission.

Anyway, put the full capability device in a vacuum chamber here on Earth and run the thing for 730 days using realistic surface conditions, including at least one dust storm. The device can either deal with the abuse of the acid test or it can't. If it can't, then sending it to Mars is pointless. If it can, then sending anything less than what you need to actually use there to survive on Mars is equally pointless. If they need more lift capability, they already have that. It's called Falcon Heavy. If you need more propellant to do the mission, then you start sacrificing flight-proven booster cores to perform the mission.

This is how scientists bilk our government out of money to satisfy pointless scientific curiosity, like studying cow farts. If the experiment was large enough to supply 1 person with O2, continuously, for an entire expected surface stay duration, then there was an actual point to running the experiment. If the experiment was big enough to refuel an empty oxidizer tank for a return flight off the surface, then there was a point to running the experiment. What I despise most is supposedly "smart" people using our tax money on pointless "virtue signaling" nonsense. This is exactly like that "self-hammering nail" idiocy. If you must drill a hole 10 meters deep to measure seismic activity, and it must go through 10 meters of whatever happens to be beneath the lander, then you design a lander that can shove 10 meters of pipe down the bore hole. Period. It really is that simple. The wheel doesn't need to be "re-invented". It needs scientists and engineers who are practical enough to use a solution that's already been proven to work, no matter what you have to drill through, and to adapt it to the constraints of the rocket that's launching it. Billions of dollars and dozens of man-years / woman-years of intelligence need not be wasted on ridiculous trivial pursuits that are of little to no engineering value.

Saturn V wasn't built to "almost" send people to the moon, or to send people if there was an upper stage that was ready. No, they built the entire thing from scratch, they tested every part of it, put it together, flew it un-crewed enough times to know for sure that it wouldn't explode on ignition, and then launched men to the moon. I can't look at SLS and not see it as a solution that could "almost" send people to the moon, if only it had an appropriately capable upper stage. All of this stuff is way, way beyond totally absurd.

The cheapest solution using legacy hardware somehow end up costing more and spending longer in development than the Saturn V program existed to begin with, yet the first one still hasn't flown. So, you tell me, what was the point of all that computer simulation hardware if it didn't make the actual engineering process any faster than the entire Saturn V program existed? The point was to transfer money out of our pockets and into their (the contractors) pockets. Isn't that painfully obvious? I wouldn't have cared if the end result was a completely usable product that did what the specifications said it would do. That's the entire point behind spending money- to get the usable product required to do something with the product that's actually worth doing. It seems as if nobody's actually interested in doing a real mission.

RobertDyck · 2021-04-22 16:58:11

"Planetary Protection" has become a problem. According to this Wikipedia article ...

In 1959, planetary protection was transferred to the newly formed Committee on Space Research (COSPAR)
...
In 1967, the US, USSR, and UK ratified the United Nations Outer Space Treaty. The legal basis for planetary protection lies in Article IX of this treaty:
"Article IX: ... States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose...

It's recommendations categorize missions:

Category IV: Lander or probe missions to the same locations as Category III. Measures to be applied depend on the target body and the planned operations. "Sterilization of the entire spacecraft may be required for landers and rovers with life-detection experiments, and for those landing in or moving to a region where terrestrial microorganisms may survive and grow, or where indigenous life may be present. For other landers and rovers, the requirements would be for decontamination and partial sterilization of the landed hardware."
Missions to Mars in category IV are subclassified further:
Category IVa. Landers that do not search for Martian life - uses the Viking lander pre-sterilization requirements, a maximum of 300,000 spores per spacecraft and 300 spores per square meter.
Category IVb. Landers that search for Martian life. Adds stringent extra requirements to prevent contamination of samples.
Category IVc. Any component that accesses a Martian special region (see below) must be sterilized to at least to the Viking post-sterilization biological burden levels of 30 spores total per spacecraft.
Category V: This is further divided into unrestricted and restricted sample return.
Unrestricted Category V: samples from locations judged by scientific opinion to have no indigenous lifeforms. No special requirements.
Restricted Category V: (where scientific opinion is unsure) the requirements include: absolute prohibition of destructive impact upon return, containment of all returned hardware which directly contacted the target body, and containment of any unsterilized sample returned to Earth.
Target categories
Some targets are easily categorized. Others are assigned provisional categories by COSPAR, pending future discoveries and research.
The 2009 COSPAR Workshop on Planetary Protection for Outer Planet Satellites and Small Solar System Bodies covered this in some detail. Most of these assessments are from that report, with some future refinements. This workshop also gave more precise definitions for some of the categories:
Category III / IV
“…where there is a significant chance that contamination carried by a spacecraft could jeopardize future exploration.” We define “significant chance” as “the presence of niches (places where terrestrial microorganisms could proliferate) and the likelihood of transfer to those places.”
Mars because of possible surface habitats.
Europa because of its subsurface ocean.
Enceladus because of evidence of water plumes.
Category V
Unrestricted Category V: “Earth-return missions from bodies deemed by scientific opinion to have no indigenous life forms.”
Restricted Category V: "Earth-return missions from bodies deemed by scientific opinion to be of significant interest to the process of chemical evolution or the origin of life."
In the category V for sample return the conclusions so far are:
Unrestricted Category V: Venus, the Moon.
Restricted Category V: Mars, Europa, Enceladus.

This means there are certain people within NASA who are actively fighting against any human mission to Mars.

kbd512 · 2021-04-22 20:43:59

Robert,

Yes, there are people within every governmental organization who will argue for spending money on fancy gadgets that do very little to improve actual capabilities, mostly for their own personal reasons and at the expense of everyone and everything else. Unfortunately, such people frequently don't have to live with the results of their decision making, which is why it's so easy for them to do it. The military is one of the best examples I can think of off the top of my head, but NASA has become another one, sadly.

The Navy needs 600 ships because 300 isn't enough to get the job done, even though they can't afford to operate the ships that they do have. Since there are too few ships and far too many missiles to contend with in the areas that they might have to fight, the obvious solution was to double the number of ships that they can't afford to deploy, despite the fact that peer level adversaries can produce a 1,000 missiles or more for the cost of a single ship, which they've done. I guess it wasn't obvious that the number of air defense missiles and/or maximum detection ranges of the radars required to track / lock / shoot down those hordes of incoming missiles needed to be doubled or tripled for the ships that they do have. Their "strategy", it seems, is to "defend themselves" by giving the enemy one or two more targets to shoot at, or not, since they can't afford to operate them. The Germans tried that nonsense in WWII. They built thousands of aircraft during WWII that they had no gas or pilots to fly, because their factories and airfields were getting blown to bits by the round-the-clock bombing raids on anything with a smokestack. We all know now that that works so well when you're grossly outnumbered, but not the Navy. The moment these yahoos are exposed to the consequences of their decision making, the correct decisions get made in record time. It's amazing how that works. Instead we spent billions on a gun that they can't afford to shoot, stealth destroyers that lack sufficient weaponry, and other similar nonsense. So, yes, people like me who have some slight clue about how this works in the real world question the hell out of such decisions.

Similarly, we have a planet named "Mars" with no signs of any life detected through the course of a dozen robotic missions, so we need to double or triple the measures we take to "preserve what's clearly not there", rather than doubling or tripling the number of other planetary probes sent to other celestial objects we haven't explored, on the off-chance that we find one that might have some form of life on it, despite the utter lack of evidence.

You have to be deliberately obtuse to believe such things, yet the number of deliberately obtuse people grows greater by the day. It always starts with a fundamental falsehood or complete lack of understanding and inevitably ends with a fundamental absurdity and, as before, a complete lack of understanding. (throws hands up)

Mars_B4_Moon · 2021-05-29 03:01:55

NASA’s MOXIE Experiment Is Making Oxygen on Mars
https://www.wired.com/story/nasas-moxie … n-on-mars/

Oldfart1939 · 2021-05-29 08:42:45

Re kdb512 post #42...

I again wish we had a "thumbs up" postable icon here.

I always fall back to the immortal words of that great American philosopher, Forrest Gump, when dealing with deliberately obtuse individuals: "Stupid is that Stupid Does."

GW Johnson · 2021-05-29 11:25:04

The phrase "planetary protection" has become an alarm word. Yet there seem to be two completely different meanings. To me, it is protection from asteroid and comet impacts, something we still lack, as did the dinosaurs before us.

To others, it refers to not messing up an alien ecology on another planet. We do have a bad habit over our history of doing exactly that, so I can see where this sentiment derives from.

But, think your way through what this might really mean, vis-a-vis Mars, where this is usually applied. The only kind of life we have ever encountered is fundamentally just like our own: it is all based on a certain kind of organic chemistry. If there were another kind, I'm not even sure we would ever even recognize it as such, despite the science fiction musings that posit such.

We don't really know, and probably will never know for sure, but current thinking posits the inevitability of life arising when there is liquid water, plus some sort of energy-producing chemistry or physics available. The early solar system is thought to have been a very violent and chaotic place. Thus, it seems life might have arisen and been extinguished many times early in Earth's history. It would have arisen "from scratch" again once clement conditions re-obtained.

We have designated the moon as "lifeless", although in my way of thinking, this may not have always been so. Very early on in the chaotic beginning, there may have been water and energy-producing chemistry/physics there, but clement conditions never returned after the late heavy bombardment, or after the moon's formation from debris left by a planetary collision that removed it from Earth. Who knows? We may never know.

Mars as best we understand (read faulty understanding at best) was once quite Earthlike and clement, with an ocean, and seeming-likely the same energy-producing chemistry and physics as here. That was around 3-3.5 billion years ago, not long after the late heavy bombardment (whatever that really was) ended. We think there were microbes alive on Earth back then, forming stromatolites. Why not on Mars, too?

If that's the case, and Mars had life as well as Earth, and under similar conditions, those two forms of life might even be distantly related two ways: (1) it's the same organic chemistry, and the same energy-production chemistry and physics, and (2) the transfer of meteorically-contained traces between planets, especially from the weaker gravity well (Mars) to the stronger (Earth).

What that means is that there might still be at least fossil traces, or fairly likely microbe survivors underground, of Martian life. It ought to be similar enough to our life that we recognize it. It might even be similar enough to interact with us, which is the possibility of infections for which we have no immunity.

As best we know, Mars went inclement a billion or more years ago on its surface. We probably will not find surface life there. We might find fossil traces. But when we dig or drill, we may well find living microbial forms. That is something to be aware of. For our protection as well as its protection.

After all, there are those traces in the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite from Mars that resemble bacterial fossils. Two NASA scientists were ridiculed for claiming they were bacterial fossils. Yet the same traces in Earthly rocks are taken as evidence of microbial life. Stupid is as stupid does, clearly.

Now, any life on Mars didn't have but a couple of billion years to evolve, before at least surface extinction. On Earth, it took around 3 billion years to get conditions clement enough to allow multicellular life. Mars didn't have that long, so it would seem unlikely we are going to find fossils of multicellular creatures there. But who knows? We might.

Looking for such things as microbe fossils and underground microbes is not the sort of thing you can build a rover to do. Not at this time in our technological history. It will take real people holding real Martian rocks and dirt in their actual hands. And when and if we find something, we have to look carefully at the possibility of infection, either way.

Terraforming Mars would bring a return of clement surface conditions. Any underground Martian microbes would be able to recolonize the surface. That makes interaction guaranteed, to whatever extent the lifeforms are similar to us. The first interaction would be with the microbes we brought with us, I would think. But it is something to think about, and to watch carefully for.

Just food for thought.

GW

SpaceNut · 2021-05-29 12:11:54

This weekend, MOXIE will run the oxygen-grabbing process for the third time since the rover landed in February, each time producing enough for a human to breathe for about 10 or 15 minutes.
Hecht says the first two MOXIE runs have produced between 4 and 5 grams of oxygen, which is the volumetric equivalent to about a gallon under Earth’s atmospheric pressure.
This weekend he expects MOXIE to produce 8 grams in an hour. Because of the power that MOXIE demands, Perseverance won’t be able to run any other experiments or collect other data during that time, Hecht says.
Hecht says that a four-person crew would only need about 1.5 metric tons of oxygen for a year for life support, but about 25 tons of it to produce thrust from 7 tons of rocket fuel.
The easiest thing would be to send an automated system six months before the crew arrives so the astronauts would have some oxygen waiting for them. It also means they’ll have to carry less equipment from Earth. “It wouldn't be worth the complexity to bring a ton of equipment to make 25 tons of oxygen for the propellant,” says Hecht.
By using a container of molten salt, Lomax and Meurisse are lowering the temperature needed to extract oxygen from the lunar soil, dropping it from 1,600 degrees Celsius (2,912 Fahrenheit) to around 600 C (1,112 F). That temperature could be reached by concentrating solar energy, a method already proven in solar power plants in the southwestern United States.

Performance was only half of the energy used which means engineering was off or there is a condition that we did not expect with its functioning.

RobertDyck · 2021-05-29 15:12:46

GW Johnson wrote:

What that means is that there might still be at least fossil traces, or fairly likely microbe survivors underground, of Martian life.

I agree with fossils, but Robert Zubrin keeps talking about an underground aquifer where microbe survivors may still live. But realize how deep that would be. This image shows depth of permafrost. It's from "A Homeowner's Guide to Permafrost in Nunavut". Click the image for the full PDF document. Devon Island is where the Mars Society built FMARS. Southern shore of Devon Island is 74.5°N, Haughton Crater where FMARS is located is about 75.38°N. Notice depth of permafrost at 75°. Yes, permafrost is deeper under water channels. Light blue at 75° is Parry Channel, the waterway between Baffin Island and Devon Island. But notice permafrost under the northern most shore of Baffin Island is 700m. That means the southern most shore of Devon Island is also 700m, and gets deeper as you go farther north.

Ground temperature at depth is the average at that location; day and night, winter and summer. Permafrost means the deep ground is permanently frozen. Permafrost only happens where the average temperature is below freezing. But deep enough the ground will be warmed by the mantle, so permafrost only extends so deep. Mars surface is a lot colder than Devon Island, and Mars has a lot less current active volcanism than Earth. On Earth there's a volcano erupting somewhere every day. Mars has evidence of active volcanoes single digit millions of years ago, but that's no where near current. There might be a currently active fissure spewing volcanic gas, but one for the entire planet. That means colder temperature both on the surface and deep from the mantle, so permafrost on Mars will be much deeper than Devon Island. Permafrost there is 700m deep, so how deep is Mars permafrost?

Mars_B4_Moon · 2021-05-29 18:47:54

MOXIE had produced five grams of pure oxygen, in simple term intense heat to break carbon dioxide molecules into oxygen atoms and carbon monoxide molecules.

RobertDyck wrote:

Then a group of scientists "discovered" it in storage, removed all engineering experiments and reconfigured/repurposed to become Phoenix. Policy by former administrator Dan Goldin was backups: if one mission failed, the experiments would be done by another. So MOXIE is an initial proof of concept experiment and 20 years overdue..

Nothing is ever too late, great news from a science point.

Lots more to be made if Mars 95 per cent carbon dioxide.

However before anyone celebrates you only have enough for a little Monkey maybe Pet Cat or Dog in a spacesuit, maybe Robots should be sent to build Greenhouses and some Biospehere, six to 10 grams of oxygen per hour — that would keep a wild cat running happy or just about enough for a little dog to breathe?

SpaceNut · 2021-10-18 23:32:05

System Modeling, Design, and Control of the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) and Implications for Atmospheric ISRU Processing Plants

Calliban · 2021-10-18 23:42:21

Sticking to the original topic of Moxie, I note that the Martian atmosphere already contains sparse concentrations of CO and O2.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars

At typical Martian temperatures, CO2 is close to its triple point temperature of ~220K. This makes CO2 compressible with relatively little pumping power. With the CO2 removed as a liquid, we could then cryogenically cool the remaing N2, Argon, CO and O2, until they selectively liquefy. Hence, without any chemical reactions, we could extract CO and O2 from the Martian atmosphere. Making methane can then proceed using the reverse gas shift reaction to produce hydrogen, which is then reacted with CO.

I would propose using an axial compressor to compress the Martian atmosphere up to pressures of 5 bar and then a piston compressor, which will compress and liquefy the CO2, with each cylinder having a drain. The axial compressor should face into the wind to ensure a steady flow rate into the fan. The liquid CO2 should be vapourised using waste heat from the KRUSTY and used to drive the axial compressor by passing the hot gases through a gas turbine. The axial compressor will need to be started using an electric motor.

Average wind speed on Mars is 10m/s and atmospheric density in the northern hemisphere is about 0.015kg/m3. That equates to an average of 0.015kg/m2/s incident on each square metre of the turbofan inlet. Of this, 0.075% by volume is CO. This amounts to 0.07 grams / m2 /s. A circular inlet, some 2m in diameter, would gather an average of 0.22 grams / second. That is 7 tonnes per year. How much CO do we need, to make all of the propellant needed by the Starship?

Last edited by Calliban (2021-10-19 00:10:01)

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