There's Plenty of Drinking Water on Mars | BEST OF 2015
Recorded Tuesday, Jul 14, 2015. The trick to producing water for astronauts is to figure out how best to extract it from the soil and atmosphere. Stephen ...
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There is a lot of water on Mars and there once was a lot of surface flowing water. You don’t see it because most of it is mixed with the soil which we call regolith on Mars. So the Martian soil can be anywhere from as little as one percent in some very dry deserty like areas to as much as 60 percent water. So one strategy for getting water when you’re on Mars is to break up the regolith which would take something like a jackhammer because it’s very cold, it’s very frozen. If you can imagine making a frozen brick or a chunk of ice that’s mostly soil and maybe half water and half soil that’s what you would be dealing with. So you need to break this up, put it in an oven. As it heats up it turns to steam. You run it through a distillation tube and you have pure drinking water that co...
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There is a lot of water on Mars and there once was a lot of surface flowing water. You don’t see it because most of it is mixed with the soil which we call regolith on Mars. So the Martian soil can be anywhere from as little as one percent in some very dry deserty like areas to as much as 60 percent water. So one strategy for getting water when you’re on Mars is to break up the regolith which would take something like a jackhammer because it’s very cold, it’s very frozen. If you can imagine making a frozen brick or a chunk of ice that’s mostly soil and maybe half water and half soil that’s what you would be dealing with. So you need to break this up, put it in an oven. As it heats up it turns to steam. You run it through a distillation tube and you have pure drinking water that co...
