Making Oxygen on Mars

[Wayne Mack]

A sticking point in travel to Mars has always been having enough oxygen for the entire mission. Here is a potential solution.

Scientists say they have come up with a potential way to make oxygen on Mars | CNN

While NASA wants to land astronauts on Mars at some point in the 2030s, the high-stakes mission would take years to complete and require more oxygen than a spacecraft could carry. Scientists say they might have found a solution.

www.cnn.com

 

[Robert Zwilling]

They want to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis. Not knowing the exact process, I'm not too thrilled about the idea except as a short term solution. I think Mars is a place where it would be better to collect water, instead of burning it up as a raw fuel. If it was a water planet that would be a no brainer. Mars could turn out to be a water planet with all the water below the surface. But if it isn't there, water is one of the most expensive things to ship around the solar system, because of weight and density. It might end being needed as a way to keep things clean, a very unexotic use for water.

The land on Mars is a toxic chemical dump, starting with perchlorate compounds, and plenty of other energy laden materials that can be used to provide vast amounts of chemical energy, including fuel for fuel cells, which could be built as big as football fields. It would be better to harvest water from all the industrial processes that need to be done to survive on Mars. There might even be rocks with oxygen or water as a chemical component that could be tapped. Energy intensive, but energy derived from chemical reactions is no problem on Mars.

Fuel cells are very interesting devices as electro chemical engines. They can be run in forward mode to produce electricity, and in reverse mode, taking electricity in and producing valuable resources, including water. Mars is venting water vapor into the atmosphere, which probably would be a better source, though harder to harvest, as some of it probably escapes the planet entirely.

 

[Dave]

I thought we would just use the ancient machine left behind by the Martians that was found in Total Recall (which IIRC did work on frozen water). More seriously though, if you breakdown Water by electrolysis into Oxygen, you also get Hydrogen. Hydrogen in the presence of Oxygen is very inflammable (think Zeppelins!) so separating the Hydrogen, safely storing it, safely transporting it, and doing something with it, would be the problems. On the other hand, if you breakdown Carbon Dioxide, you will have a large amount of Carbon Monoxide to dispose of (poisonous to us red-blooded aliens and that Martian life that we haven't found yet). The article, and the other article that it links to, don't actually say, but that is the chemical reaction that Scientific American proposed. Obviously, you could feasibly produce Oxygen and elemental Carbon, but no idea how you dispose of mounds of Carbon dust. That is going to be very dirty. It looks like no sooner are we leaving Earth than we are already planning to pollute Mars! Also, all of this is dependent of copious supplies of cheap electricity from solar power, but you first need to have a solar collection system on Mars, and you will need large areas of them. How do they intend to build those? I think it is all blue red sky thinking!

 

[tinkerdan]

Don't forget the:

Giving Mars a Magnetosphere

An addendum to “Terraforming Mars”

medium.com