Researchers in China have developed an intelligent chemical robot that may be able to extract oxygen from water on Mars.
According to the scientific journal Nature, the robot supported by artificial intelligence will use materials found on the red planet to produce catalysts that extract water and produce oxygen.
The research team said that artificial intelligence concluded that it was possible to analyze water, which is known to exist in the form of ice at the poles of Mars and under its surface, in a process that would have taken human research for two thousand years.
The study was supervised by Jun Jiang from the University of Science and Technology of China. Jiang and his team used a mobile machine the size of a refrigerator equipped with a robotic arm to analyze five meteorites collected from Mars or Earth.
The team’s goal was to verify whether the machine could produce useful catalysts from available materials.
According to the results reached, the robot succeeded in analyzing water, and the team stated that the robot may be able to produce oxygen from it, with the possibility of using it on a future Mars mission.
Andy Cooper, a chemist at Britain’s University of Liverpool, said: “If you think about the challenge of going to Mars, you have to use local materials. So I think the robot idea makes sense.”
