Scientists in China have created a robot chemist powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that can extract oxygen from Martian water without human supervision.
Synthesizing useful resources from local materials on Mars will be essential for humans’ survival on the Red Planet. Extracting oxygen from materials — in a process called oxygen evolution reaction (OER) — is particularly vital, researchers wrote in a paper describing the new AI chemist, which was published Nov. 13 in the journal Nature.
To that end, the team built a mobile robot that automated the entire process of extracting oxygen from five Martian and Martian-like meteorite samples. They also tested the system in a simulated Martian surface environment.
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