Scientists have found a way to make Mars missions more successful than ever before with the help of robot chemists. This AI powered robot chemist can break down water components and produce oxygen from it. The produced oxygen will not just help astronauts to breath but also use as rocket propellant.
The study has been published in Nature Journal in which it suggests that meteorites from Mars, rocks that crashed down on Earth after cosmic impacts blasted in the Red Planet, can take out a chemical reaction that ‘splits’ water molecules to generate oxygen and hydrogen gas, all with robot chemist’s help.
The AI-powered robot calculated more than 3.7 million molecules it might make from six different metallic elements in the rocks after scanning them with a laser – iron, nickel, manganese, magnesium, aluminum, and calcium. Without any human interaction, the robot chemist worked on the samples for six weeks and synthesized 243 distinct compounds.
The great mind behind the study was Jun Jiang, co-senior author of the study and a scientist at the University of Science and Technology of China said, “When I was a boy, I dreamed of interstellar exploration, So when we finally saw that the catalysts made by the robot could actually produce oxygen by splitting water molecules, I felt like my dream was coming true. I even started to imagine that I, myself, will live on Mars in the future.”
Scientists had the notion after discovering substantial amounts of frozen water ice on Mars’ surface. Producing oxygen from compounds available on Mars eliminates the need to transport a large amount of oxygen-producing materials from Earth.
The scientist also agreed that the discovery was only possible because of Artificial Intelligence robot chemists; otherwise it would have taken 2,000 years to come up with this experiment.
