Secondly, the statement that both Dalhousie and myself are contesting from you is " So the required technology will have to be developed. It is not rocket science."It is rocket science. It is not trivial like you make it out to be. Nobody is contesting what SpaceX's plans are. You brought that up on your own and nobody but you has talked about it.
Mining is a very difficult activity on Earth (particularly hard rock mining, aka if you're dealing with permafrost (ice + regolith). Even on Earth, mining and ore processing equipment are very prone to wear and breakdowns. This in environments we have well quantified. What we don't have quantified well is Martian permafrost. What dissolved compounds are in it and in what ratios? How much particulate / debris, and in what size ratios, and how does that vary as you progress through a play with respect to depth and location? How does the play thickness vary? How does sublimation affect things as you work through a play? We know very, very little about what we'd be mining through. Just making a little rock abrasion tool or sampler arm for loose material is challenging enough. And when you're talking about enough ice to make propellant for whole fleets of ITS-sized vehicles, you're talking about large scale mining. Meaning equipment with heavy parts that are hard to replace, and where if you mess up you can knock down a wall or bend important pieces of equipment. Equipment that can kill people.Right now, the TRL for ice mining on Mars is 2-3, according to NASA analyses of the different approaches. There's lots of different approaches proposed. None are remotely mature.
Attached is what i got. Methane burns hotter at stoichiometric mixture, but thats not the only difficulty. Can we maybe move this off to another CO rocketry thread ?
High combustion temperature? Not according to these calculations (refer to the column labeled "Ctemp").Attached are two older papers on oxygen-CO, the second of which maps out the conditions under which the combination ignites. There are some tricks to ignition, but it does not seem an insurmountable problem.
Quote from: Robotbeat on 10/17/2016 03:41 amI've seen little analysis about actually using that carbon monoxide as fuel. It seems people either are unaware it's possible, or they're aware but only remember "it has low Isp," dismiss it out of hand as such, and aren't actually aware of a serious trade that incorporates carbon dioxide as a fuelThen i can only conclude you are not actually interested in the subject. Like i mentioned, CO based rockets have been discarded like 10-15 years ago. Easily the most referenced comprehensive study:http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/340Rice.pdf
I've seen little analysis about actually using that carbon monoxide as fuel. It seems people either are unaware it's possible, or they're aware but only remember "it has low Isp," dismiss it out of hand as such, and aren't actually aware of a serious trade that incorporates carbon dioxide as a fuel
CO is probably a lot more common industrial fuel than people realize (it's the ultimate oxidizer in steel making) but it's not noticed because it doesn't cause trouble and that's because the technology and procedures to handle it (in an industrial environment) are well developed.
Quote from: john smith 19 on 04/07/2017 09:07 amCO is probably a lot more common industrial fuel than people realize (it's the ultimate oxidizer in steel making) but it's not noticed because it doesn't cause trouble and that's because the technology and procedures to handle it (in an industrial environment) are well developed.CO is really neat stuff in general, not just a waste product. It's quite stable at ambient temperatures and pressures, but at elevated temperatures and pressures becomes unstable, even to the point of decomposing to carbon and CO2. Which makes it a natural precursor to the generation of hydrocarbons, since the carbon generated would rather join to almost anything else (hence CO + H2 forming syngas for the production of synfuels). If you want a petrochemical industry on Mars, you want CO.
CO is really neat stuff in general, not just a waste product. It's quite stable at ambient temperatures and pressures, but at elevated temperatures and pressures becomes unstable, even to the point of decomposing to carbon and CO2. Which makes it a natural precursor to the generation of hydrocarbons, since the carbon generated would rather join to almost anything else (hence CO + H2 forming syngas for the production of synfuels). If you want a petrochemical industry on Mars, you want CO.
CO can also be used in a fuel cell and internal combustion engines, both turbines and diesels.
The papers linked above have been presented.http://www.ice2017.net/conference/presentations#thursday
As a fun little side note, Altius got to do the vacuum bakeout on some of the MOXIE hardware a few weeks ago. The company building the motors for the scroll compressors is the same company we selected to do the actuators for the RCS thruster gimbal we're doing for ULA, and they didn't yet have the facilities to do vacuum bakeout in-house, so they paid us to do that for them. Kind of cool to say we had Mars hardware in our facility. ~Jon
Quote from: jongoff on 06/21/2017 03:52 amAs a fun little side note, Altius got to do the vacuum bakeout on some of the MOXIE hardware a few weeks ago. The company building the motors for the scroll compressors is the same company we selected to do the actuators for the RCS thruster gimbal we're doing for ULA, and they didn't yet have the facilities to do vacuum bakeout in-house, so they paid us to do that for them. Kind of cool to say we had Mars hardware in our facility. ~JonA nice demonstration of how companies clustering together around a share resource form an ecosystem. Perhaps the first of many collaborations?
Quote from: john smith 19 on 08/16/2017 07:15 amQuote from: jongoff on 06/21/2017 03:52 amAs a fun little side note, Altius got to do the vacuum bakeout on some of the MOXIE hardware a few weeks ago. The company building the motors for the scroll compressors is the same company we selected to do the actuators for the RCS thruster gimbal we're doing for ULA, and they didn't yet have the facilities to do vacuum bakeout in-house, so they paid us to do that for them. Kind of cool to say we had Mars hardware in our facility. ~JonA nice demonstration of how companies clustering together around a share resource form an ecosystem. Perhaps the first of many collaborations?Nothing new. Ball sends their spacecraft to Lockheed Martin for environmental testing. The same thing happens in SoCal. And there is also the bay area collaboration
Nothing new. Ball sends their spacecraft to Lockheed Martin for environmental testing. The same thing happens in SoCal. And there is also the bay area collaboration
A MOXIE-like system, scaled up several hundred times (2 to 3 kg/hour of oxygen production versus MOXIE’s 6 to 8 g/hour), could produce sufficient oxygen to launch a MAV for a crew arriving one 26-month cycle later.
An important goal of MOXIE is to demonstrate successful operation during day and night throughout all martian seasons, showing robustness to variations in atmospheric pressure and temperature.
At the observed rate of increase, MOXIE is expected to meet nominal requirements (6 g/hour with 55 g/hour of CO2 intake) for more than 60 cycles.
Has anyone heard of any recent updates ??
Since Perseverance landed on Mars in 2021, MOXIE has generated a total of 122 grams of oxygen – about what a small dog breathes in 10 hours. At its most efficient, MOXIE was able to produce 12 grams of oxygen an hour – twice as much as NASA’s original goals for the instrument – at 98% purity or better. On its 16th run, on Aug. 7, the instrument made 9.8 grams of oxygen. MOXIE successfully completed all of its technical requirements and was operated at a variety of conditions throughout a full Mars year, allowing the instrument’s developers to learn a great deal about the technology.