Experimental

In order to accomplish the goal of producing oxygen on a martian like environment our team had to look at many different ways of sustaining a bioreaction in conditions akin to those on earth. However, this comes with significant challenges as the martian environment in its current state is nothing near habitable, even for some of the most resilient species. The solution that we settled upon was a modular multistage bioreactor. The bioreactor would consist of five main stages, each of these responsible for a separate task in the bioremediation process. The bioreactor would initially begin the extraction process with the introduction of the perchlorate rich soil into water. This will cause the dissociation of a positive cation and the negative [ClO4]-1 anion into solution. It is expected that the majority of the positive cations would be Na+ and Mg+2. This subsection would then be responsible for the dilution of this solution to the correct concentration. However, before it can be used by the e coli, the solutions need to be cleaned of its other ions mainly include sulphites and many other molecules that do not dissociate in water easily. According to NASA’s baseline assumptions it can be expected to see about 44.84% SiO₂, 9.32% Al₂O₃ and 10.42% FeO all of which are highly insoluble in water and can therefore be separated with a series of simple filters (Anderson et al. 57). The most feasible way to deal with the presence of these few remaining ions is to pass them through a sulphite filter or other filter specifically targeted toward an ion - a technology that has been well developed for winemaking and food processing. The aforementioned salts in the water greatly reduce the freezing temperature which allows this portion of the bioreactor to operate at a lower temperature, reducing the amount of energy required for this subsystem.