18 Months of MOXIE (Mars oxygen ISRU experiment) operations on the surface of Mars - Preparing for human Mars exploration

By the time of the 2022 IAC, NASA's Mars2020 Perseverance rover will have spent 18 months on the surface of Mars, during which time the MOXIE experiment (Mars OXygen ISRU Experiment) will have produced oxygen at night and in the day during both the annual maximum and minimum atmospheric density periods, as well as at many other times during the year. MOXIE is the first demonstration of the use of indigenous resources (ISRU = In Situ Resource Utilization) on the surface of another planet. This paper will present a summary of what MOXIE has accomplished, how its performance on Mars has changed with time, and plans for the future. The paper will also present results from an optimization study of a human-scale MOXIE-type system capable of providing the oxidizer for a 6–person Mars Ascent Vehicle. As an experiment carried inside the rover, MOXIE had to satisfy many constraints that would not apply to an independent, full-scale system. Other potential oxygen-producing technologies should be compared to the optimized human-scale system results summarized in this paper rather than to a simple linear scaling of the mass, power consumption, and oxygen production rate of MOXIE.