In its current state, Mars is inhospiit; the surface is dusty and the only water you have is frozen near the poles, under the deep floor, or so tightly hooked to the floor that it would have to be cooked in an oven to remove it. The air is unsurpable and the thin environment allows disturbing degrees of radiation while maintaining an average temperature of -81 degrees Fahrenheit. At some point in the past, however, it would possibly have looked much more like Earth and possibly been more lasting for life.
The objectives of Perseverance, a characteristic component of the larger project of March 2020, are to explore the problems of this ancient habitability, characterize the environment and help pave the way for long-term human exploration. One of the seven experiments traveling on the rover will focus in particular on long-term human projects to Mars: MOXIE, short for Mars OXygen In situ Resource Use Experiment, will help us prepare for those first projects by demonstrating that we can make our oxygen on Mars to use in rocket propellants and for the team to breathe when astronaut scouts arrive. MOXIE proposed and evolved through collaboration between researchers from MIT’s Haystack Observatory and MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), as well as engineers from nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
MIT is also well represented in other facets of the mission. Perseverance will bring a complicated formula of ing, chanting, caching and preserving rock and soil samples to bring them back to Earth one day. Associate Professor of Geobiology Tanja Bosak and Professor of Planetary Science Ben Weiss, whether from MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), are involving scientists who will paint with this formula to help collect and analyze samples from the Martian surface. And Ariel Ekblaw, a graduate student in the arts and media sciences and founder and director of the SPACE Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, contributed to a summer experiment at the JPL that will look for evidence of microbes from the past.
The little mechanical tree
In the 2015 film The Martian, when astronaut Mark Watney (played through Matt Damon) found himself stranded on Mars, he controlled enough time to coordinate a rescue project with his team living in the land of the Red Planet. This is the fundamental precept of on-site resource use, or ISRU, and MOXIE represents a vital first step in making ISRU for Mars explorers in the long run.
“Not only do you want oxygen for other people to breathe, but you also want the rocket to breathe. If you burn fuel, you want oxygen to consume it,” says Michael Hecht, MOXIE’s principal investigator and director of studies at MIT Haystack. Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts. “There’s an explanation for why oxygen tanks are the heaviest elements of an area flight manifest.”
Launches consume a lot of fuel: pushing a spacecraft out of Earth’s gravitational pull requires a lot of energy, and returning to Earth requires a fresh start. In addition, the heavy tanks needed to transport the oxygen needed for a given project occupy valuable genuine heritage in a calibrated spacecraft. That’s where the ISRU technique comes in.
“Instead of taking him with us, why not do it when we get there the way we want to?” Hecht said. “Oxygen exists on Mars, but not in a way we can use. So that’s the challenge we were looking to solve with MOXIE.”
A possible source of oxygen is ice that exists beneath the Martian surface. But extracting this ice would require complex machinery, and the physical act of digging and drilling would result in significant wear and tear from the appliance, which is a challenge when a repairman is on a planet. Fortunately, there is some other potential resource that the team can use to generate oxygen: the atmosphere.
“With the mining approach, we need to extract the ice, refine it and process it to release oxygen and bring it back, which we simply can’t do through a robot, especially in our area limitations,” he says. “I sought to find a much easier approach. The Martian environment has 96% carbon dioxide, so we built a small mechanical tree because it is much less difficult than building a miniature autonomous mining company.”
The purpose of MOXIE is to collect abundant carbon dioxide in the Martian air, convert it into oxygen and measure oxygen purity. After sucking in the Martian air, the formula filters the dust, compresses it and then inserts it into the forged oxide electrolyzer (SOXE), the key detail that takes the carbon dioxide strain and uses a mixture of electrical and chemical energy to divide the molecule. oxygen. carbon monoxide. Oxygen purity is analyzed and oxygen is released into the Martian atmosphere.
Currently, at least 10 oxygen production cycles of the project are planned in as many other seasonal and environmental situations as possible. Due to the amount of intense energy required to carry out the MOXIE experiment, the team will coordinate with the other researchers, who will have to close the MOXIE runtime for several hours and then wait a maximum of one Martian day (called soil). to recharge the piles of perseverance. The knowledge will be sent back to a lab on the MIT campus, where MOXIE compliance will be analyzed.
Bringing
In 2013, NASA submitted a call for proposals for oxygen generation experiments for the 2020 rover within the express parameters. Although he worked on the Phoenix Mars Lander assignment during his 30 years at the JPL, when Hecht joined his existing position at the MIT Haystack Observatory in 2012, he no longer expected to be a “Mars Gars”, he thought he had ended up with Mars forever. . But his former JPL colleagues disagreed and asked him to lead the experiment as lead researcher. According to Hecht, even after signing, he thought the allocation proposal was long, but in July 2014, he and his colleagues learned that they had obtained the assignment.
“Researchers from other NASA laboratories had a huge head and an abundant technological legacy. The variety of MOXIE is a huge marvel for me,” says Hecht. “Since this project is human-centered, I knew we had to identify genuine credibility with the human exploration community, that we weren’t just looking for an excuse to make an attractive science. So how can we convince them that we are genuine? And we need help with human exploration? It took me about five minutes to think of Jeff Hoffman.”
Hoffman, professor of practice at MIT AeroAstro, knows a thing or two about the exploration of the human area. He recorded 4 walks through the area, his five flights through the area during his astronaut career at NASA, and added the initial rescue/recovery project to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993.
In addition to Hoffman’s extensive delight in area manned flights, he shared some other link with Hecht: Hecht Hoffman’s first graduate student as a new MIT researcher before being called into the astronaut program in 1978 and pursuing a career at NASA. He returned to MIT in 2001 and, in addition to being an assistant principal investigator at MOXIE, leads the Human Systems Laboratory at MIT and teaches courses on manned area flight systems.
“It’s a wonderful pleasure to collaborate with a former graduate student as colleagues, especially on a task like MOXIE, because it shows how vital graduate scholars are to the study procedure in a story that will close the circle,” Hoffman says. “Not only do graduate academics make paintings on an assignment, but we also expand the next generation of other people who will continue the exploration not only of Mars, but of the entire solar system.”
AeroAstro Ph.D. Scholars Eric Hinterman SM ’18 and Maya Nasr ’18 have been part of the MOXIE team since 2016, when Hinterman was pursuing his master’s degree and Nasr led an assignment of studies related to MOXIE as a junior in aeronautics and astronautics.
For his master’s thesis, Nasr focused on calibrating the sensors of the MOXIE unit by conducting experiments under other pressures and temperatures and situations that mimic the environment on Mars. The goal of his master’s paintings was to perceive how sensors can behave differently in an environment like Mars, and calibrate them accordingly to return to precise knowledge of the mission. Your PhD paintings will focus on processing and analyzing the knowledge of the MOXIE experimental laboratory and the knowledge of telemetry that will be backed by Mars, which will help determine how well the unit is working in its oxygen extraction task.
“For me, personally, it means a lot for the pictures of this task and it is surprising that the launch is already taking place. I grew up in Lebanon and I don’t forget to see the Curiosity Rover landing, and at that time the director of NASA’s JPL was Dr. Charles Elachi, who is of Lebanese descent,” Nasr says. “Seeing it in assignment control made me realize that I was conceivable to be part of an assignment to Mars, and that’s one of the reasons I implemented at MIT.”
The new member of the MOXIE team is Justine Schultz, AeroAstro’s master’s student, who joined in the spring of 2020. Schultz, who also paints full-time at General Electric, will make his latest paintings on building a detailed thermal style of MOXIE.
What’s in a name?
Since Mars OXygen’s “Experiment on the Use of On-Site Resources” is a bite, Hecht sought to become artistic with the project’s call for it. The initial inspiration comes from Moxie soda, which was invented in Massachusetts in the 19th century as a nerve relief tonic. When the company combined it with sparkling water for increased carbonation, it began flying off the shelf and became one of the first mass-produced soft drinks in the United States.
In addition to the local connection and vital role of carbon dioxide in the good fortune of Moxie soda, Hecht believes that the meaning of the word that has become a component of our cultural lexicon is suitable for the project. Merriam-Webster defines “moxie” as “energy, encouragement, courage, determination and know-how”. The deeper meaning has become even more applicable as the world faces a damaging global pandemic with the final line in sight.
“The stage with the coronavirus has in fact caused delays compared to what we thought we were, but fortunately, it never jeopardized the mission. Despite some setbacks, we had to turn and adapt to keep the pitch on track,” Hecht said. “But to hell with COVID-19, we released this rover.”
The launch window is one thing because it marks the era of time when Earth’s orbit around the sun aligns with that of Mars so that a rocket can adhere to a flight trail like turning lanes into a road to succeed in its target. landing point in the Jezero crater on Mars. The window closes on 15 August and will not reopen for 26 months.