Could a robot chemist create oxygen from the resources already on Mars?

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Photo by NASA on Unsplash
Photo by NASA on Unsplash

International researchers have developed an AI robot chemist that can make oxygen from Martian meteorites, and they say similar technology could one day make human missions to Mars easier and more cost-effective. The robot was given five categories of meteorites confirmed to exist on Mars to analyse, and it was able to identify chemicals in the meteorites that could react together to produce oxygen, and test the performance of different strategies of oxygen production until it found the best one - a process the researchers say would have taken 2000 years of human work. The researchers say technology like this could allow future Mars missions to produce oxygen for rockets and life support systems using materials readily available on the planet.

Media release

From: Springer Nature

Chemistry: Robot chemist makes oxygen from Martian meteorites *VIDEO* 

Oxygen-producing materials made from meteorites found on Mars have been produced using a robotic artificial intelligence (AI)-chemist. The research, published in Nature Synthesis, provides a proof-of-concept for generating oxygen and may have implications for future manned missions to Mars.

Potential future manned missions to Mars will require oxygen as it is essential to human activity on the planet, being used in rocket propellants and life-support systems. One of the ways to make these potential missions more cost-effective in the long term and less complex would be to use resources already present on the planet to create oxygen, rather than transport materials from Earth. Recent evidence of water on Mars and analysis of the elemental composition of meteorites found on the planet could provide an opportunity to make catalysts using Martian resources.

Jun Jiang and colleagues developed a robotic AI-chemist that is able to create catalysts that can be used to produce oxygen from Martian materials without human intervention. The authors selected five different categories of meteorites that come from or have been confirmed to exist on Mars, which were analysed by the robotic AI-chemist.  The robotic AI-chemist was able to convert the meteorites into chemical compounds and make catalysts from these compounds before testing the catalysts’ oxygen production performance. This process was repeated by the robot until the best catalyst had been found, which they suggest could have taken 2,000 years of human labour. The authors then showed that this catalyst could operate under simulated Martian conditions.

This robotic AI-chemist allows for the automated production of catalysts using Martian meteorites, which may lead to a way for humans to make oxygen on Mars in the future, the authors conclude.

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conference:
Nature Synthesis
Research:Paper
Organisation/s: University of Science and Technology of China
Funder: Y.L. acknowledges funding support for this research from the Innovation Program for Quantum Science and Technology (Grant 2021ZD0303303). J.J. gratefully acknowledges financial support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 22025304, 22033007) and the CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research (Grant YSBR-005). Q.Z. gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 22103076) and Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Grant 2108085QB63). We also gratefully acknowledge the USTC Center for Micro- and Nanoscale Research and Fabrication for providing experimental resources and the USTC supercomputing centre for providing computational resources.
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