Caltech
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Konstantinos P. Giapis with a reactor that converts carbon dioxide into molecular oxygen. This reactor is expected to provide oxygen on Mars.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id—In recent years, the plan to be able to establish a colony in Planet Mars seems to continue to roll and become an interesting discussion widely not only among scientists. But the main problem to be able to live there is the lack of oxygen availability.
While a lot of science fiction is full of terraforming schemes and oxygen generators for very good reason, we humans need oxygen molecules to breathe, and space simply doesn’t have it. Even on other planets with thick atmospheres, oxygen is hard to come by.
So, when we explore space, we need to bring our own oxygen supply. That’s not ideal because a lot of energy is needed to lift objects into space on a rocket, and once the supply runs out, it’s gone. So how can we live on Mars?
A study from the California Institute of Technology tried to examine this possibility. Because as we all know, humans need oxygen to breathe and if we had to keep bringing oxygen to Mars, it wouldn’t be ideal, according to researchers.
Details of the research have been published in leading journals Nature Communication by title “Direct dioxygen evolution in collisions of carbon dioxide with surfaces” which can be accessed online and is an open access journal.
As is well known, one place where oxygen molecules do exist is beyond Earth and that is in the clumps of gas flowing from comets. The source of the oxygen remained a mystery until Konstantinos P. Giapis, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, and his postdoctoral fellow Yunxi Yao, proposed a new chemical process that could explain its production.
Giapis, together with Tom Miller, professor of chemistry, have now demonstrated a new reaction to produce oxygen that Giapis says could help humans explore the universe and maybe even combat climate change on Earth. More fundamentally, he said the reaction represented a new kind of chemistry discovered by studying comets.
Caltech
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Planet Mars.
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Most chemical reactions require energy, which is usually heat. Giapis’ research shows that some unusual reactions can occur by providing kinetic energy.
When water molecules are fired like tiny bullets at a surface that contains oxygen, such as sand, the water molecules can release that oxygen to produce molecular oxygen. This reaction occurs in comets when water molecules evaporate from the surface and are then accelerated by the solar wind until they crash back into the comet at high speed.
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