06 March 2019
Growing food from thin air to feed astronauts
... on weather, irrigation or even land; it breaks down water molecules to create hydrogen, mixes it with a sprinkling of nutrients and carbon dioxide plucked from the air and feeds this into microbes to create the protein. The electricity needed...
23 April 2021
Mars rover instrument, MOXIE, extracts first oxygen from Red Planet
... substance you find on the ground, and putting it through a processing plant, making it into a large structure, or taking carbon dioxide – the bulk of the atmosphere – and converting it into oxygen,” she said. “This process allows us to convert these...
March 2016
Saving Earth from an Expanding Sun
... and left a desert planet, coated with dense clouds of sulphuric acid and an atmosphere composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide. That kind of death spiral will happen to Earth - either if we fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases or if we just...
May 2021
In-situ propellant design for Mars ascent vehicles
... has detected methane leakage among the rocks, which could be an indication of microbial life. Moreover, there is frozen carbon dioxide, especially in the north and south polar regions, and investigations made by rover thermal sensors have discovered...
24 September 2021
New reactor could turn Mars' atmosphere into rocket fuel
... have a thin, tenuous atmosphere compared with Earth’s, but the wispy skies it does have is composed of 95 percent carbon dioxide, 3 percent nitrogen, 1.6 percent argon, along with traces of other gases and lots of dust. Wu suggests that potential...
12 May 2021
Scientists discover liquid water inside a meteorite
A meteorite from an ancient asteroid that formed 4.6 billion years ago has been found to contain small pockets of carbon dioxide-rich liquid water, a finding which provides direct evidence of the dynamic evolution of the solar system. On this ...
