November 24, 2020

MOXIE engineer Asad Aboobaker of JPL explains how the instrument works in this video interview.

Transcript:

00:00
[Music]
00:04
hi
00:04
I'm Raquel Villanueva with the news team.
00:06
Here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California
00:10
now right now there is an exciting project happening
00:14
right here that could one day help astronauts breathe
00:17
on another planet as we get ready to go
00:19
back to the moon and eventually mars so that's why i'm
00:23
here with Asad Aboobaker, he is the system engineer
00:27
for an experiment called moxie now
00:30
moxie's going to be on the next Mars rover
00:32
and it's going to help create or it's
00:35
going to try to create
00:36
oxygen on mars so i have plenty of
00:40
questions if you have questions
00:42
please put them in the comments starting right now
00:45
so first off tell us where we are we are
00:48
in the JPL insitu development lab and isru
00:52
is an acronym that stands for in-situ resource utilization
00:55
and that means being able to use the
00:57
resources available to you
00:59
at the location that you're going to
01:00
rather than having to bring all of the
01:02
uh raw materials with you yourself so uh
01:05
it makes it so that you don't have to uh
01:08
launch as much stuff you can just go and
01:10
live off the land so to speak so what exactly is moxie?
01:13
Moxie is is an oxygen plant and Moxie
01:17
stands for the Mars
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oxygen isru experiment and so what we're doing
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is we're demonstrating technologies that
01:24
would be used to generate oxygen on the surface of
01:27
mars uh on the next mars roving mission so you're saying it
01:30
was an acronym before yes yeah
01:32
so so is it like an acronym
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acronym within an acronym we've got that
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isru in the middle of the moxie acronym
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which is a little recursive for those
01:41
fans of the persian out there okay that
01:43
is a lot to remember I'm very impressed
01:45
so can you explain to us how moxie works
01:48
Sure
01:49
Yeah, Moxie basically has inside it
01:52
a pump that draws in gas this is uh
01:55
the inlet tube draws in gas here it goes
01:58
inside and we can take a look inside our
02:00
model a little bit later
02:01
into the pump which compresses it and
02:03
delivers it to our electrolysis system
02:05
the electrolysis system operates at 800 degrees celsius
02:08
and it is responsible for doing the
02:10
electrochemistry which reacts the Co2
02:13
with a catalyst and generates oxygen and
02:15
separates it out from the co2 gas stream
02:18
and then runs it through some sensors
02:20
and dumps it outside the rover so last time i saw it, it was in
02:23
this kind of bell jar glass dome that's right
02:26
what is that for that is because Mars
02:29
has a very different atmosphere than
02:30
earth so
02:31
we can't simulate the operation of Mars effectively
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in an earth's atmosphere environment so
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we put a glass bell drawn here to make
02:39
it a vacuum system so that we can put in
02:41
a mars-like atmosphere that's about 100
02:43
the density of earth's and mostly Co2
02:45
and the second thing i noticed was all
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the bling is that actual gold
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it is in fact actually gold.
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Gold is a very efficient reflector
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of infrared heat and because we have
02:55
this very hot electrolysis system inside
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we wanted to make sure that we didn't radiate heat
03:01
onto any of the other things around us
03:03
within the rover and so we plated it
03:05
gold to make sure that we didn't cause any negative
03:08
effects on anything around us so how hot does it get
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the inside gets to 800 degrees celsius
03:14
and that's where the electrochemistry happens but
03:16
we have a really good installation
03:18
system around that so that the outside
03:20
doesn't get very wrong
03:21
and are you i heard before you might be
03:23
running some tests on that.
03:25
Yeah, what are you doing right now that's
03:26
right today we've been just running some
03:27
additional tests just to make sure we
03:29
understand completely how we're going to operate the instrument
03:31
on mars and it makes cool sounds when it
03:34
does it does make cool sounds although
03:35
it's a little annoying so we're not going to run it right now i also want to
03:38
know what it looks like on the inside well if you can come over
03:41
here we have a model that shows what the different parts inside look
03:45
like so this is basically the same as that in a plastic 3D printed version
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so this big chunk here
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that's this it would go here this is
03:53
where all the electronics live
03:55
this is that pump that I mentioned earlier so the inlet gas comes in here
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goes into this pump and then it gets
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delivered to this box here which is the electrolysis system
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and inside this elect this box is a bunch of insulation to keep all the
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heat in and an electrolysis stack that looks very
04:12
much like this and so this is really the heart of moxie right here
04:18
is it lightweight oh no it's not it's actually quite dense it's very
04:22
yeah you can go ahead and pick it up oh
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Wow, yeah I did not expect it to be this
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heavy because it looks light when you first see it right
04:27
Well, I'm very strong so that too
04:31
How much oxygen is this making right now?
04:34
None
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but on Mars it will be generating about six grams an hour of oxygen.
04:39
Okay, and how much is that can humans survive on that?

04:43
six grams an hour could probably keep a small dog alive
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if you wanted to keep a sleeping human
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alive it would probably be closer to 20 grams an hour of oxygen
04:51
um and if you wanted to run a larger scale system that could
04:56
you know do multiple humans it would
04:58
have to be scaled up quite a bit
05:01
so short-term plans it's going to be on the rover?
05:04
Correct, so where is this going to live this sits inside the belly of the rover
05:09
so in some ways it's a little isolated from the environment around us uh on mars uh but
05:14
it does have a inlet filter that sits on the outside so
05:17
that where we draw the gas in from so
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I mean, if I were a Mars rover would
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probably be somewhere around my river
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somewhere I don't know exactly I'm not
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I'm not a doctor I'm not that kind of doctor
05:27
and then long-term goals for it would it
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have to be a lot bigger than
05:31
this to work for humans absolutely yeah
05:34
We would need basically something that scaled up
05:36
from this by about a factor of 200 to make a useful
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system for future human exploration of
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Mars that's not just to generate oxygen for humans breathing but
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we don't just want to send people to Mars we also want to get them back and
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one of the most important elements of getting people back from
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Mars being able to get a rocket off the surface
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and oxygen is a very important component of rocket fuel
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and so a scaled-up version of moxie would
06:01
generate also the oxidizer for use in
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the rockets to get off of the surface of Mars
06:06
Why is it easier to make oxygen on Mars rather than
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just bring it up it really comes down to
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mass we could just based on what we've learned already
06:16
from moxie scaling that moxie to a full
06:19
human exploration scale would make weigh
06:22
about a ton, whereas if we wanted to bring
06:26
all that auction with us from earth we'd
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have to launch something like 200,000 tons of oxygen from earth very soon
06:32
it's probably the same as this.

I'd also want to know, does this have a practical application one
06:39
day on earth or could it one be it might not this not specifically in
06:43
the way it's done on Moxie but uh the uh the technology can be used uh
06:48
in a number of ways it's very flexible
06:50
We just because the only thing we know we have available is Co2 on mars
06:54
but on earth we have other things available like water and if you run
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water and Co2 through this sort of electrolysis system
07:00
you can generate things that are precursors for
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uh useful things like fuels or plastics or things like that and so
07:06
this might something like this might uh
07:08
end up reducing our dependence on fossil fuels
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Moxie has a lot of potential right now
07:12
absolutely what does it need to succeed
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on Mars what needs to happen
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we need to get there and we need some electricity
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and then we're good to go and are there any questions out here absolutely yes
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so on the topic of electricity they want to know how much power
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does it use that is a great question when we're at full tilt generating
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oxygen it takes about 260 watts of electrical power
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and so we run we generate oxygen for about two hours potentially and at that time
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by that point we basically drain the rover's batteries so they have to
07:44
stop and they got to recharge so we're
07:46
also getting asked could technology like this be used to reduce
07:49
Co2 in earth's atmosphere?
07:52
It depends on how you generate the electricity to run it so
07:56
for example if you're using fossil fuels to generate the electricity to
07:59
react with co2 then it doesn't help, but if you maybe if you have solar or
08:04
wind then yes you could but then one of the outputs of this process is
08:07
carbon monoxide so then you have to figure out what are you going to do
08:10
with the waste product which is carbon monoxide it's industrially useful that
08:14
you know there's probably if we were using this on on an earth scale
08:18
it might have more carbon monoxide than we know what to do with right and we've
08:22
also had a lot of people express interest in working at JPL and NASA.

how did you get where you are today?
08:29
Oh, that's a great question well I should say that I studied
08:34
really hard, but uh you know I don't
08:40
[Laughter]
08:43
No, I have a Ph.D. in physics and I was like studying hard um yeah it was
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at times and I've always been interested in space and i just happened to
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be able to get in contact with some people here that were looking for
08:57
uh people to work on interesting problems and
09:00
it just worked out i kind of want to know what's the most exciting part
09:04
about working on Moxie being able to send something to Mars
09:08
Is amazing. I know people at JPL do that all the time this is like
09:12
old hat people send stuff to Mars here at JPL. For me this is very new so it's
09:15
very exciting for me and also being able to do something
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that's really never been done before that
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is really an exciting opportunity for me.
09:23
That's great. Well let's just leave it on one last side of moxie if you want to
09:28
see more behind the scenes footage like this and talk to Asad
09:31
again because he's super cool!
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Please follow all our social media channels at NASA JPL.
09:36
Once again I bring you Moxie

Credits

NASA/JPL-Caltech

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