The colonization of Mars requires technological advances to enable humans to return to Earth. It is not possible to send propellant gas and oxygen for a return trip.
Now, a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has come up with a concept that would produce Mars rocket fuel that could be used to bring astronauts back to Earth. The bioproduction process would use three of the Red Planet’s resources: carbon dioxide, sunlight, and frozen water.
This includes transporting a microbe called cyanobacteria (algae) along with a strain of E. coli bacteria to make rocket biofuel. The cyanobacteria (algae) would absorb CO2 from Mars’ atmosphere and use sunlight to make sugar, while a manipulated E. coli would be shipped from Earth that would convert those sugars into a Martian-specific propellant called 2,3-butanediol, rockets and other propulsion devices .
Current rocket engines leaving Mars in the near future are said to be powered by methane and liquid oxygen (LOX), but none of them abound on the Red Planet. This means that astronauts would have to be transported from Earth to put a return probe into orbit around Mars, but it is very expensive to transport. NASA and other studies have suggested some alternatives to inferring the two elements in the field, but these technologies are not yet mature enough to work on a large scale.
The Georgia Institute of Technology’s proposal includes biotechnology-based in situ resource use (Bio-ISRU) that can produce both propellants and LOX from CO2. In addition to reducing mission costs, the process would also produce 44 tons of excess clean oxygen that could be made available for other purposes, such as helping human colonization.
Photobioreactors the size of four soccer fields covered in cyanobacteria could produce rocket fuel on Mars. Source: BOKO mobile study
The process of producing enough fuel for the trip back to Earth begins with transporting plastic materials to Mars, which are assembled into photobioreactors the size of four soccer fields. In these reactors, the cyanobacteria would be supplied with sunlight and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Enzymes in a separate reactor would break down the cyanobacteria into sugars that could be fed to the E. coli to produce the 2,3-butanediol and oxygen, which would then be separated off in further process steps.
The team’s research found that the process uses 32% less energy – but weighs three times more – than the proposed chemically-enabled strategy of moving methane from the earth and producing oxygen through chemical catalysis.
“They use much less energy to launch on Mars, which gave us the flexibility to consider various chemicals that are not intended for a rocket launch on Earth,” said Pamela Peralta-Yahya, a correspondent author on the study and associate professor at the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry and ChBE, who develops microbes for the production of chemicals. “We began to think about how we could use the planet’s lower gravity and lack of oxygen to develop solutions that are not relevant for takeoffs on Earth.”
The team is now trying to carry out the identified biological and material optimization to reduce the weight of the Bio-ISRU process and make it easier, faster and more efficient than the proposed chemical process.
“We also have to carry out experiments to show that cyanobacteria can be grown under Martian conditions,” said Realff, who works on algae-based process analyzes. “We have to take into account the difference in the solar spectrum on Mars, both due to the distance from the sun and due to the lack of atmospheric filtering of sunlight. High UV values could damage the cyanobacteria. “
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