Building a life support system and whether building materials and fuel can be obtained locally are the keys to supporting the Mars base in the future. Recently, a team proposed a new method for oxygen production on Mars based on plasma, which can expand the extraction of carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and decompose it into Oxygen scale.
The atmosphere of Mars is 95% composed of carbon dioxide gas, and oxygen only contains 0.13%. If humans want to colonize Mars, they must move equipment to Mars to produce oxygen on the spot. One of the scientific instruments carried by NASA’s Perseverance rover, the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment Instrument (MOXIE), was designed to try this technology. Last April, it successfully produced a small amount of oxygen from the thin atmosphere of Mars for the first time.
Recently, the team of physicist Vasco Guerra of the University of Lisbon in Portugal invented a new method of using artificial plasma to break down carbon dioxide on Mars and convert it into oxygen for breathing and nitrous oxide as fertilizer for crops. Vasco Guerra said the approach would only require solar panels to collect energy, a generator to ignite the plasma, and a suitable membrane to filter out the oxygen and avoid carbon monoxide as a by-product.
When ice is heated, it becomes water, and when water is heated, it becomes steam. When steam continues to heat, it breaks more bonds and removes electrons from the nucleus. It becomes plasma. These charged free electrons can be accelerated by a magnetic field to obtain a large amount of energy. It can then be destroyed and dissociated into oxygen.
The extremely low atmospheric pressure of Mars is just right for this plasma technology, and it can also expand the extraction scale than MOXIE equipment, but if it is to support a base, the real equipment needs to consume a lot of electricity, which is another problem to be solved. The new paper is published in the journal Applied Physics.
(Source of the first image: pixabay)
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