This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: As NASA prepares to send humans to Mars as early as the 2030s, University of Mississippi researchers are working on one of the key questions: How will they get back? Traveling millions of miles to Mars will require huge amounts of fuel.
Coming back could take as much or more. Instead of hauling that much fuel across the stars, researchers are improving a technology that could allow future astronauts to make rocket fuel using resources already available on the red planet. "You can't bring up everything you need from Earth, because every additional kilogram adds enormous cost and complexity to launch and escape Earth's gravity," said Ahmed Badreldin, assistant professor of chemical engineering.
"So the question becomes: How do we make the fuels and chemicals needed for space exploration from the resources already available at the destination?" In a study published in ACS Catalysis, Badreldin and Carter Racine, a doctoral mechanical engineering student at Texas A&M University, showed that future astronauts may be able to make fuel out of thin Martian air. The atmosphere on Mars is roughly 96% carbon dioxide, one of the molecules humans exhale when they breathe. Using an engineered copper catalyst that is 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, the researchers showed that carbon dioxide can be converted into methane.
"The work we're doing is basically taking CO2 and using electricity to convert it into carbon-containing fuels and chemicals," Racine said. "We want to do that because right now many of these carbon-based products ultimately come from virgin fossil resources. "If we can make them using captured CO2 and renewable electricity, it could reduce reliance on virgin fossil carbon and help close the carbon cycle." Other technologies can perform the same reaction, but those methods often produce multiple unwanted byproducts, Badreldin said.
"The main technical challenges for Mars applications are that you cannot assume the same extensive separation and purification infrastructure that we have on Earth," the Ole Miss researcher said. "On Earth, you can separate (wanted and unwanted products), but on Mars, the product ultimately needs to approach propellant-grade purity." The copper catalysts that the researchers are developing are designed to push the reaction toward methane with high selectivity, reducing the burden on downstream purification. The technology could also be beneficial on Earth, the researchers said.
Methane is the primary component of natural gas and is used to make fuels and industrial chemicals. "On Earth, there's a lot of interest now in using methane as a feedstock for producing higher-value chemicals like alcohols," Badreldin said. "If methane can be produced on site from CO2, then upgraded locally, it could enable more distributed production of fuels and chemicals instead of relying only on large, centralized facilities." While the idea of using the technology to remove vast quantities of carbon dioxide from Earth's atmosphere—where the greenhouse gas traps heat and contributes to planetary warming—is alluring, the technology is not there yet, Badreldin said.
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