Look, I know that the Perseverance rover has brought some flashy stuff to Mars. It’s got lasers, it’s got a big robot arm, it’s got a little rob

MOXIE Might Be the Most Exciting Thing Perseverance Has Brought to Mars

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2021-05-28 19:30:04

Look, I know that the Perseverance rover has brought some flashy stuff to Mars. It’s got lasers, it’s got a big robot arm, it’s got a little robot arm, and it even launched a helicopter. That’s all great, but tucked up inside of Perseverance is another instrument about the size of a car battery that doesn’t move even a little bit and in fact spends most of its time not functioning at all. It’s the appallingly bacronymed Mars Oxygen ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization) Experiment, or MOXIE, and I’m going to try to convince you that it’s the most exciting thing happening on Mars right now.

MOXIE’s job on Mars is to demonstrate that it’s possible to break the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into carbon monoxide and oxygen through solid oxide electrolysis. The carbon monoxide is returned to the atmosphere, while the oxygen is stored and can be used in a variety of ways. MOXIE has already run successfully a couple of times, producing 5.4 grams of 98% pure oxygen over the course of an hour on April 20. 5.4 grams isn’t much, only enough to provide an astronaut with about 10 minutes of breathable air, but it proved that the system worked.

It’s a little bit strange to have MOXIE on Perseverance at all; MOXIE would be perfectly happy to remain completely stationary and derives no benefit from being hauled all around Jezero crater. The fact that it ended up on a rover (potentially taking the place of a science instrument that could have taken advantage of Perseverance’s mobility) seems to have been the result of shifting priorities at NASA with a history that goes back to the 1970s. After the successful Apollo missions, some folks at NASA (including Wernher von Braun, chief architect of the Saturn V) advocated for the development of a crewed mission to Mars. NASA decided to focus instead on low Earth orbit, starting work on the Space Shuttle, followed by the International Space Station. There simply weren’t all that many resources left over for any other major initiatives.

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