Technical Paper Session I-B - The Prospect of producing Breathing Oxygen, Pure Hydrogen and propellants from the Martian Atmosphere

Technical Paper Session I-B - The Prospect of producing Breathing Oxygen, Pure Hydrogen and propellants from the Martian Atmosphere

Cocoa Beach

The cost of manned Mars missions could be significantly reduced if O2, water, and propellant were to be extracted from the CO2-rich Martian atmosphere. The objectives of this paper are to explore techniques of producing pure O2 from the Martian atmosphere, and examine chemically stable reactors for H2 production.

A method for obtaining O2 on Mars is a high temperature solid oxide electrolysis of yttriastabilized zirconia (YSZ) where CO2 is electrochemically reduced to CO and pure O2 is evolved from the opposite electrode compartment. An electrochemical cell will be demonstrated for CO2 electrolysis with concomitant production of pure O2 under partial pressures commensurate with the Martian atmosphere. Also, this paper investigates the impact of the In-Situ Resource Utilization for Mars mission by providing ultra pure H2 and a chemically stable reactor in CO2- rich mixtures needed to achieve long range mobility on Mars. The fabricated rector is permeable to H2 with infinite selectivity, chemically stable in CO2, and does not require external electrical circuit. In addition, a system-level modeling will be presented to estimate cost, size, energy, power, weight, and volume equipment of a full-scale Mars mission.