NASA wants to produce water and oxygen on Mars Moon - Daily News - Lisbon

NASA is planning missions to the Moon and to Mars in 2018 and 2020 to perform tests that could demonstrate how to produce water and oxygen.

NASA, along with the CSA (Canadian Space Agency), plans to send an all-terrain robot to the Moon by 2018 and Mars by 2020. These experiments are called ISRU (exploitation of resources on site). This would probably be the most important scientific advance since Armstrong stepped on the moon for the first time in 1969.

On the moon, the mission objective is to analyze the constituent of lunar soil and perform experiments of extracting water and other volatile substances such as hydrogen and oxygen. On Mars, the vehicle shipped seek to extract oxygen from the atmosphere.

To date, only twelve men stepped onto the lunar surface, all of them between 1969 and 1972. Lara Louise, astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, explained to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that “putting a pound into space costs more than a million euros”. Thus, the load sent on missions is the smallest possible so that they can carry all the necessary electronic devices, avoiding the transmission of large amounts of water and fuel.

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water and oxygen to assist in the survival of astronauts on a mission in space and fuel for the return trip down costs and would make space travel of longer duration.