NASA Acting Chief Administrator Robert Lightfoot, Jr. spoke to Futurism earlier this week hinting at some extraordinary developments that may be currently underway “When you look at our plans today [for getting to Mars], we use the International Space Station as much as we can…for example, our life support systems, we test them up there.”
Lightfoot explains that
getting to Mars will take a developmental approach such as the one that built
the International Space Station, in order to foster habitability for humans
over time. The International Space Station for example is constantly undergoing
new experiments, and adding new modules in the effort to make low earth orbit
more habitable for astronauts. So far, the longest stay on the ISS is one year
completed by American astronaut Scott Kelly.
Building a civilization on
Mars not only consist of getting to the red planet, but also living on
it. “We try and make sure that, when we do a science mission or a human
spaceflight mission, that we have a cross between the science and the human
exploration,” and this is precisely where developments like the new Mars Rover
come into play.
The new rover for the 2020
mission by NASA will conduct experiments to attempt the generation of
breathable oxygen from Mars’ atmosphere – this could potentially be an early
fail safe for Mars astronauts. “The next lander that is going to
Mars, Mars 2020, has an experiment where we are going to try and
actually generate oxygen out of the atmosphere on Mars, clearly that’s for
human capability down the road,” says Lightfoot.
Tests will be conducted
using MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In situ resource
utilization Experiment) which has been installed on rover. If it can
successfully produce small amounts of oxygen at the surface, the next step is
to place a similar device 100 times larger on Mars to produce breathable oxygen
for arriving travelers.
The atmosphere on Mars
consists of 95.32 percent carbon dioxide, 2.7 percent nitrogen, 1.6
percent argon, and about 0.13 oxygen along with other traces of specific
elements. Earth’s atmosphere in comparison contains 78 percent nitrogen
and 21 percent oxygen.
While it sounds far-fetched
to create oxygen from a planet’s atmosphere, but there have actually been plans
to do this for some time including an idea that would bringmicrobial life to Mars to help with oxygen production.