Scientists have just found a way to make oxygen on Mars. Will this open up opportunities to bring humans to live in these distant planets?
Mars probe ship. Generates oxygen on other planets The Perseverance expedition ship of the US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has just made history. It successfully experimented with converting carbon dioxide gas from the Martian atmosphere into oxygen. This is the first time that oxygen production has been performed on another planet. The Mars experiment using local oxygen resources, called MOXIE, is a device the size of an automobile battery and is placed inside the Perseverance. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is the manufacturing unit. MOXIE is made of a heat-resistant material such as a nickel alloy. It is designed to withstand extreme temperatures of up to 800 degrees Celsius. The device is coated with a thin layer of gold to prevent heat and damage to the Perseverance vessel. On the first test run, MOXIE generated 5.4 grams of oxygen – enough for an astronaut to breathe easily for 10 minutes while still performing normal activities. Engineers will conduct additional tests and find ways to increase oxygen production. By design, MOXIE can generate 10 grams of oxygen per hour. NASA expects the development of experimental instruments not only to help generate oxygen for astronauts in the future, but also to help generate large amounts of oxygen to be used as a rocket launcher for the return journey without. must be transported from Earth. The Perseverance expedition landed on Mars on February 18 to perform a mission to search for signs of microbial life on the “Red Planet”. In the coming years, the Perseverance ship aims to collect 30 soil and rock samples to send back to Earth (estimated around 2030) for analysis. Dang Vu Tuan Son, Club of Astronomy and Astronomy of Vietnam, said that oxygen-rich atmosphere should not be seen as steel evidence for life on other planets. Nowadays, to look for signs of life, scientists often use biological structures as guides. Its biological form and life-forming compounds serve as indirect evidence for its presence. On Earth, the oxygen in our atmosphere is one of the most obvious biological characteristics that an alien astronomer can notice. It is only in our atmosphere in such large quantities because plants and bacteria photosynthesize it has been creating it for billions of years. Oxygen is not synonymous with life A new study published April 13 in the journal AGU Advances suggests that terrestrial planets around stars like the Sun can develop oxygen atmospheres without help. from life. This means that detecting oxygen on a planet does not mean that the planet is capable of life. This study uses a computer model that allows scientists to experiment and observe the evolution of a planet. In the first model test, the researchers attempted to accurately reconstruct our Earth. Then they changed the initial conditions to different from what was made up of Earth, and the results they got showed that there are many cases where the planets still contain oxygen but do not require any changes. living. In fact, they have found three main ways for a rocky planet to have an oxygen-rich atmosphere without the presence of life. The first scenario is an Earth-like liquid water planet with oceans 50 times (or more) larger than on Earth. All of that water puts great pressure on the planet’s crust, shutting down the geological activity. This prevents things like the weather and the melting of rocks being two factors that cause oxygen to disappear from the atmosphere. The second scenario is the opposite: A dry desert world with 30% less water than Earth and they will solidify with a “steam atmosphere” for about a million years. This provides a large amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, as sunlight breaks down the molecules of water and hydrogen released into space. And because the planet’s solid desert surface cannot remove any oxygen, it stays in the atmosphere. The last way for a lifeless planet to have an oxygen-rich atmosphere is if the original planet had a higher ratio of carbon dioxide to water than the early Earth. In this case, the planet undergoes a greenhouse similar to what happened on Venus and becomes too hot for oceans to form in the first place. It is also too hot for volatiles to exist in the planet’s mantle, where they will isolate oxygen through chemical reactions. Instead, these volatiles are in the atmosphere, where they can no longer remove oxygen. The planets could have better life than the Earth Researchers have identified more than 20 planets outside the Solar System that have better conditions for life than Earth. Some of these planets have orbits stars that are probably even better than the Sun. A study led by Dirk Schulze-Makuch at Washington State University published in the journal Astrobiology details the features of planets with superlative potential, including is composed of planets that are older, slightly larger and warmer, and possibly more water than Earth. Life can also easily develop on planets moving around slower-changing stars that have longer lifespans than the Sun. The top 24 candidates for habitable planets are all located more than 100 light-years away from us, but Schulze-Makuch says this rescue could help future observations to focus properly, such as the James Webb space telescope, NASA’s LUVOIR space observatory and ESA’s PLATO space telescope. Researchers have selected planetary systems that are likely to have terrestrial planets moving around the parent star in the region of the habitable zone (an area that allows water to exist as a liquid on the planet’s surface) from Kepler’s archival data on transiting exoplanets. Our sun has a relatively short lifespan, less than 10 billion years, because it takes nearly 4 billion years for complex life to form on Earth, so many stars are similar to the Sun (types of G stars). ) may run out of fuel before life can develop. Along with monitoring the types of G stars, the researchers are also observing K-stellar systems, which are colder, smaller, and fainter than the Sun. Type K stars have lifespans that can last from 20 to 70 billion years. That allows the planets moving around it to grow older and allow life to have more time to have life as complex as Earth does today. However, for the planets to stay alive, the planets could not be too much as they could end geothermal activity and no longer have a protective magnetic field. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old today, but researchers think that the most ideal time for life on a planet is between the ages of 5 billion and 8 billion.
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