Rocket fuel from scratch: Here's how scientists plan to exploit microbes in Mars for fuel

Considering the capabilities of current technology, touching down on Mars will not be a cakewalk. But what is going to be even more difficult is making a return journey from the red planet as the availability of sufficient fuel will play a big factor in ensuring the return of humans back to Earth. Addressing this challenge, new research published in Nature Communications has suggested that humans can exploit the microbes on the red planet to produce rocket fuel, as per Gizmodo.

Mars can offer key ingredients for making rocket fuel

The authors of the study suggest that key ingredients like carbon dioxide, frozen water, and sunlight can be directly harnessed on Mars for making rocket fuel for the return trip. Other essentials for the fuel like Cyanobacteria or blue-green algae, a bioengineered strain of E. coli bacteria and other materials to build photobioreactors will be carried from the Earth to Mars.

The reason behind all this extra burden of the payload is to cut launch costs as the study estimates that if a Mars-bound rocket decides to carry fuel for the return journey, it would cost around $8 billion for 30 tons of methane and liquid oxygen. As for the fuel production mechanism, the lead researcher Nick Kruyer from Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering along with his colleagues has designed a new strategy for the same. 

How will the fuel be produced?

Under this new strategy of production, the experts plan to power the cyanobacteria using carbon dioxide and sunlight, which is in abundance on Mars, to produce sugar. This sugar will then be exposed to the E. Coli bacteria that will convert it into a propellant called 2,3-butanediol. According to the experts, this fuel is not the most energetic but still enough to thrust the rocket out of Mars' influence as its gravity is just one-third of the Earth. The study affirms that the fuel obtained after the breakdown by E.Coli bacteria will be 95 per cent pure and will surely get the job done. 

If successful, this new prospect will add to the alternatives of fuel production on Mars as scientists had assumed that methane was the only option for producing rocket fuel from abundant carbon dioxide on the red planet. 

(Image: NASA/Twitter/@SpaceX)