Current Event 20

 Caroline Hulbert     4.25.21

AP Bio C Even Current Event 20

Grossman, Lisa. “NASA's Perseverance Rover Split CO2 to Make Breathable Air on Mars.” Science News, 23 Apr. 2021, www.sciencenews.org/article/nasa-perseverance-rover-mars-oxygen-air.  

For this current event, I chose to review Lisa Grossman’s article, “NASA's Perseverance Rover Split CO2 to Make Breathable Air on Mars.” Grossman begins detailing the experimental device on the Mars Perseverance rover, which recently Split carbon dioxide molecules into their component parts, creating around 10 minutes’ worth of breathable oxygen. The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, abbreviated to MOXIE, is “about the size of a toaster” and breaks oxygen atoms off of carbon dioxide, which is the primary component of Mars’ atmosphere. Because of this, researchers like Michael Hecht at MIT have called it “an electrical tree.” MOXIE was sent with Perseverance to Mars and arrived there on February 18th. On April 20th, MOXIE warmed up to around 800℃ and ran until it produced five grams of oxygen. Grossman then clarifies that the primary focus of producing oxygen on Mars isn’t for breathing, but rather for the return to Earth. The burning of fuel requires oxygen, so astronauts traveling to Mars in the future will either have to bring oxygen with them or produce it there. According to the article, 25 metric tons of oxygen are needed to lift a rocket with a few astronauts off of the planet’s surface. MOXIE is a prototype for the device astronauts could use to make fuel in the future. It can create only 10 grams of oxygen per hour, running for around one Martian day at a time. A scaled-up version, however, could run continuously for 26 months. Because it is powered by Perseverance, MOXIE cannot run continuously, as the rover needs to use its power to continue the mission of searching for signs of past life on Mars.

This article is extremely important to the future of space travel, and opens the door for future research and missions. The success of this technology could set the stage for a permanent research station on Mars, and brings us even closer to human travel to Mars. 

This article was very well-written and informative about current scientific research and developments. The author included opening details that hook the reader in and introduce the discussed topics that may be unfamiliar to some readers. She often sourced other ScienceNews articles, but it would have made her more credible to include information from other sources, like NASA. I thought that it would have been interesting if she had explained how MOXIE actually works and how oxygen is extracted from the carbon dioxide molecules.