Researchers in China have developed a robot chemist powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that might be able to extract oxygen from water on Mars. The robot uses materials found on the red planet to produce catalysts that break down water, releasing oxygen. The idea could complement existing oxygen-generating technologies or lead to the development of other catalysts able to synthesize useful resources on Mars.
“If you think about the challenge of going to Mars, you have to work with local materials,” says Andy Cooper, a chemist at the University of Liverpool, UK. “So I can see the logic behind it.”
The study, published in Nature Synthesis1, was led by Jun Jiang at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. Jiang and his team used a mobile machine the size of a refrigerator with a robotic arm to analyse five meteorites that had either come from Mars or been collected on Earth but mimicked the Martian surface. The team’s goal was to investigate whether the machine could produce useful catalysts from the material.
The AI-powered system used acid and alkali to dissolve and separate the material, then analysed the resulting compounds. These then formed the basis of a search of more than 3.7 million formulae for a chemical that could break down water — known to exist as ice at Mars’ poles and under the planet’s surface — a process the team said would have taken a human researcher 2,000 years. The result was an oxygen-evolution reaction catalyst that could release oxygen from water, with the potential for use on a future Mars mission.
“We have developed a robotic AI system that has a chemistry brain,” says Jiang. “We think our machine can make use of compounds in Martian ores without human guidance.”
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