This is amazing! Just scale this up, send a dozen or so of them to Mars for redundancy and you've got the first necessary life support system for a Mars colony. Really exciting stuff.
I built a CO2 filter for my house, a "bioreactor" full of algae fed by an air pump! It was a fun project, although by my napkin math, I'd need about 200 of them to offset the breathing my family does. Still a good proof of concept, and I haven't optimized the output at _all_.
Anyway, my point is - why do we need exotic technologies to convert CO2 to oxygen? An algae bioreactor can do it using decades-old and well-understood techniques, plus you can build yummy algae cakes out of the waste product.
> The algae didn't just convert the CO2 to O2, there needed to be an energy input for that.
Yeah, but from the article,
"MOXIE works its magic by sucking in air, filtering out dust, and compressing and heating the gases to 800 degrees Celsius. The heated air flows through a solid oxide electrolysis instrument that splits carbon dioxide—which makes up 96 percent of the Martian atmosphere—into oxygen and carbon monoxide."
So it's not as if MOXIE works for free either.
> mars gets less sun than earth
Yeah, about 43% as much. You can address that with mirrors.
Now we are talking about mirrors, temperature control, salinity control, food sources, killing competing organisms, water intake and filtering, somehow shielding them from radiation (while still allowing sunlight!) and probably a billion things I haven't thought about yet. Mess it up and your organisms are all dead.
MOXIE sounds better if all you want is oxygen (and CO). Give it power and off you go.
> Now we are talking about mirrors, temperature control, salinity control, food sources, killing competing organisms, water intake and filtering
lol, this comes across as FUD. Mirrors aren't high technology. They have no moving parts and do not require batteries.
Temperature control? Keep it the same temperature as your habitat, you should already have parts for that. Heck, keep it in your habitat. But algae isn't that sensitive, it can operate over a temperature range.
Salinity control is absurd, who's putting salt in the water and why can't you just tell them to stop?
Water intake and filtering? What? Dude it's essentially just water in a transparent container. There's no flowing or filtering.
Killing competing organisms? Algae is the competing organism, it can take care of itself, even if we brought competing organisms to Mars, which would be a silly thing to do.
I mean, maybe radiation is a factor, I don't know, but all that other stuff is not challenging.
And you're spending so much time inventing "challenges" for a simple algae farm, while just handwaving at a device that needs to compress the gas and heat it to 800 degrees celsius?
I'm not saying MOXIE won't work, or won't be useful in some circumstances. It's just that I don't understand why it's supposed to be simpler than tried-and-true alternatives.
