This Revolutionary AI-Powered Robot Could Produce Oxygen On Mars – SlashGear

The main challenge in making oxygen on Mars is that you must work only with what you have available on the planet. The robot turns meteorites on Mars into breathable air. Oxygen, for the robot chemist, would be the beginning of the opportunities for such technology.

The study, published in Nature Synthesis, notes, “Using a machine-learning model derived from both first-principles data and experimental measurements, this method automatically and rapidly identifies the optimal catalyst formula from more than three million possible compositions.”

According to the study, it demonstrates that the robot chemist solves two major problems: the need for an unmanned synthesis system and the ability of the machine to discern what materials it’s working with so it can do the former. AI robots are the preferred technology being explored to address the Mars-oxygen problem. 

Michael Hecht at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory in Westford worked on the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, known as MOXIE, notes in a study that the robot could synthesize small amounts of oxygen in a Martian atmosphere made up mostly of carbon dioxide during a trip to the planet in 2021. He suggests that while its current output is minimal, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t be augmented.