What does moxie do

Skip to main content. Mars Mission Perseverance Rover. Liquid oxygen propellant is something we could make there and not have to bring with us. One idea would be to bring an empty oxygen tank and fill it up on Mars. Listen to Our Podcast About moxie. Get Word of the Day delivered to your inbox! Sign Up.

From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. Style: MLA. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Love words? Need even more definitions? Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms The same, but different. Caption :. Credits :. Illustration of the Perseverance rover on Mars with its science instruments. Related Articles. Going to the Red Planet. More MIT News. Radio-frequency wave scattering improves fusion simulations By incorporating the scattering of RF waves into fusion simulations, MIT physicists improve heating and current drive predictions for fusion plasmas.

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To learn more, read our Privacy Policy. Look, I know that the Perseverance rover has brought some flashy stuff to Mars. The carbon monoxide is returned to the atmosphere, while the oxygen is stored and can be used in a variety of ways. MOXIE has already run successfully a couple of times, producing 5. However, in the late s, there was a small window where NASA felt like the Shuttle and the ISS were stable programs, and the agency was willing to start thinking about Mars exploration again.

The window closed as the ISS rapidly got much more expensive, but one Mars mission squeaked through, sort of— Mars Surveyor Instead, Mars Surveyor was intended to run experiments on the Martian surface in the context of future crewed missions. Really, getting anything into space period is all about mass. For example, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy can put 16, kg into Mars transfer orbit, but doing so requires over 1. It would be easier, it would be cheaper, and it would be safer.

That window would shut again when the agency decided to refocus on the Moon, but it was open long enough for MOXIE to sneak through. MOXIE is, fundamentally, a fuel cell. Here on Earth, we use fuel cells to generate energy by combining a gas like hydrogen with ambient oxygen in the air to produce electricity along with water as a byproduct. In exchange, MOXIE produces about as much oxygen as a smallish tree, between six and 10g of O 2 per hour, less than half what it would take to keep a human alive.

A mission to Mars with four crew members that spends a year on the surface will only need about a ton of oxygen for breathing. Getting back to Earth, though, will require at least 25 tons of oxygen, along with seven tons of methane or another kind of rocket fuel.

The other problem with ice, Michael Hecht says, is that the places where we know we can get at it are, for lack of a better word, boring. If we could instead utilize resources we find at the destination, that would make our exploration efforts more efficient.

As you might expect, scaling MOXIE up is slightly more complicated than just stapling of them together. For example, MOXIE has to be very careful about how it splits up the CO 2 , because otherwise the reaction will produce wayward carbon atoms that gum everything up in the form of soot.

That last one was of particular concern, but it turns out that thanks to favorable dust particle size and very low atmospheric pressure, filters work much better on Mars that they do on Earth. And when you need to spend years on Mars with no maintenance, reliability alone is not enough, explains Hecht. So you want some redundancy. Michael Hecht is optimistic:. I think this is different because of the scale of the investment. The oxygen production capability would be set up a few years before the astronauts ever got there.

The plan is to test some of these components on the Moon. As for MOXIE, the plan is to run it up to ten times over the course of the Perseverance mission, characterizing how the system responds to different inputs. All it has left to prove now is that it can survive over the long term, giving us confidence that we can send this technology to Mars and rely on it to get us home.

Are most, if not all, of the future US Mars missions, even human, utilizing radioactive substances over solar for electrical power?

To fight on tomorrow's more complicated battlefields, militaries must adapt commercial technologies. In August , engineers from Lockheed and the U. Army demonstrated a flying 5G network, with base stations installed on multicopters, at the U. Driverless military vehicles followed a human-driven truck at up to 50 kilometers per hour. Powerful processors on the multicopters shared the processing and communications chores needed to keep the vehicles in line.

It's , and the sun beats down on a vast desert coastline. A fighter jet takes off accompanied by four unpiloted aerial vehicles UAVs on a mission of reconnaissance and air support.

A dozen special forces soldiers have moved into a town in hostile territory, to identify targets for an air strike on a weapons cache. Commanders need live visual evidence to correctly identify the targets for the strike and to minimize damage to surrounding buildings. The problem is that enemy jamming has blacked out the team's typical radio-frequency bands around the cache.

Conventional, civilian bands are a no-go because they'd give away the team's position. As the fighter jet and its automated wingmen cross into hostile territory, they are already sweeping the ground below with radio-frequency, infrared, and optical sensors to identify potential threats.

On a helmet-mounted visor display, the pilot views icons on a map showing the movements of antiaircraft batteries and RF jammers, as well as the special forces and the locations of allied and enemy troops.

While all this is going on, the fighter jet's autonomous wingmen establish an ad hoc, high-bandwidth mesh communication network that cuts through the jamming by using unjammed frequencies, aggregating signals across different radio channels, and rapidly switching among different channels.

Through a self-organizing network of communication nodes, the piloted fighter in the air connects to the special forces on the ground. As soon as the network is established, the soldiers begin transmitting real-time video of artillery rockets being transported into buildings. The fighter jet acts as a base station, connecting the flying mesh network of the UAVs with a network of military and commercial satellites accessible to commanders all over the world.

Processors distributed among the piloted and unpiloted aircraft churn through the data, and artificial-intelligence AI algorithms locate the targets and identify the weapons in the live video feed being viewed by the commanders.

Suddenly, the pilot sees a dot flashing on the far horizon through his helmet-mounted display. Instantly, two of the four teammates divert toward the location indicated by the flash.

The helmet lights up a flight path toward the spot, and the pilot receives new orders scrolling across the display:. The two UAVs that have flown ahead start coordinating to identify the location of hostile forces in the vicinity of the downed aircraft. A Navy rescue helicopter and medical support vessel are already en route.

Meanwhile, with the fighter jet speeding away on a new mission, the two other UAVs supporting the special forces squad shift their network configuration to directly link to the satellite networks now serving the base-station role formerly played by the fighter jet.

The live video feed goes on uninterrupted. The reconfigurations happen swiftly and without human intervention. Warfare has always been carried out at the boundary between chaos and order. Strategists have long tried to suppress the chaos and impose order by means of intelligence, communication, and command and control.