a few percent argon, trace amounts of everything else. But there's still a lot of CO2, and

so that's probably the most abundant resource on Mars other than dirt. CO2 has oxygen bound

in it. And if we can liberate that oxygen from some of that CO2, then we can use it

to do something useful. The goal is to pave the way for future human exploration of Mars

by demonstrating the ability to generate oxygen. That's where the magic happens is inside that

box. NASA is set to launch its next rover to the red planet in 2020. Stacked inside

are seven science instruments, six of which are focused on sample analysis like this SuperCam

and a spectrometer called PIXL that'll measure chemical signatures inside Martian rocks.

And this box getting lowered inside the belly of the rover is MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen

In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. It's got an agenda separate from the others, and

that's to make oxygen on Mars for the first time. Well, at least in real life. In the

Martian, there was something that was called the oxygenator. If the oxygenator breaks,

I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks, I'll die of thirst. So we jokingly refer

to MOXIE as the oxygenator. It's unclear in the movie what technology the oxygenator is

actually using, but it's very likely that it would be something like MOXIE but scaled

up. MOXIE uses a technology called solid oxide electrolysis. It works a lot like a reverse

fuel cell where instead of putting in a fuel and getting electricity out, we can put electricity

in and electrolytes and basically get a fuel and an oxidizer out. On the outside the rover,

we have a small box with a filter. The filter is to make sure that we don't draw in any

dust from the Martian atmosphere into our system, because the next thing in the path

is a scroll compressor. The scroll compressor takes this low pressure Martian gas from the

atmosphere and compresses it and brings it up to something closer to Earth's atmospheric

pressure. Because the next thing that we do is we run it into this thing. We call this

our solid oxide electrolysis stack and it is basically a layer cake of a bunch of metal

plates, which are the dark green things. And then these light colored layers are thin ceramic

cells that have particular chemical properties where at high temperature, they can conduct

electricity using oxygen as the charged carrier. We heat this guy up to about eight hundred

degrees Celsius. You have oxygen ions on one side and you apply a voltage, then you can

selectively dry the oxygen through the ceramic membrane and separate it out from whatever's

on the other side. It goes through a set of sensors very much like these sitting here

on the table in front of me. And we measure what fraction of CO2 is there. We put CO2

in here. Oxygen comes out here. And the waste product, which is a mixture of CO and carbon

monoxide and unreacted CO2 comes out here. It's gold because we were concerned that

MOXIE itself would run hotter than everything else around it. And we wanted to make sure

we didn't impact any of the nearby electronics boxes inside the rover. And so, gold has very

low emissivity, so it doesn't radiate heat effectively. This particular chemistry process

is sort of unique to Mars in its applicability, and also the packaging and how we actually

build this system to survive launch and get to Mars. No one has ever done anything like

this. MOXIE is going to make about six grams per hour of oxygen. It's not very much. It's

about enough to keep a small dog alive. We don't have the resources available on the

rover to run MOXIE for long periods of time continuously because a lot of the rover energy

has to be used for other science that they want to do. We will probably run MOXIE at

roughly once every two months. The goal for us is to sample different environmental conditions

on Mars. So day versus night, summer versus winter, dust storm versus not dust storm...to

assess how the technology behaves in response to these changing environmental conditions.

What might happen in the future really depends on the technology that NASA decides to go

with on Mars. If you're assumption is that you only have the CO2 in the atmosphere available,

then you'd have something like MOXIE scaled up by about a factor of two hundred. You'd

launch it and deliver it to Mars about two years before humans set foot there. It would

have a bunch of supporting equipment like a power system and a storage system, and it

would sit for two years and just generate oxygen and collect it, and then it would be

ready for use by the humans when they show up two years later. It's really exciting for

me to be able to build something that's going to land on another planet. I hope that it's

gonna work the way we expect it to. And that paves the way for future human exploration

in the not too distant future.