Fuel and oxygen harvesting from Martian regolithic brine
Pralay Gayen, Shrihari Sankarasubramanian, Vijay Ramani
Abstract
Significance The active Martian water cycle, i.e., the presence of a shallow water table and soluble perchlorates in the Martian regolith, enables the concurrent production of hydrogen fuel and life-support oxygen on Mars through perchlorate brine electrolysis. Our perchlorate brine electrolyzer operating under simulated Martian surface conditions produces >25× the amount of oxygen produced by the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment from NASA’s Mars 2020 mission for the same input power. This work provides an additional route to help NASA fulfill its mandate to land humans on Mars by 2033. Furthermore, our perchlorate brine electrolyzers are more efficient than state-of-the-art alkaline water electrolyzers under terrestrial conditions, providing a pathway to utilize suboptimal input feeds to produce ultrapure hydrogen and oxygen.