My Little Pony: My Little Pony The Martian

Mission Log – Solar Day 522

We started producing rocket fuel from water. In fact, it is not as difficult as imagined.

Yesterday, I extremely carefully installed the pony thruster system in place on the opening left after removing the secondary maneuvering thruster system. Our last bit of modification work outside the MAV cabin was completed. The last piece of unnecessary equipment in the cabin, the triple redundant communication system, will be dismantled today by Dragonfly and Fireball. After this work is completed, the only remaining work is to install the remaining three Pony flight seats and two RTGs - the installation of the latter will be postponed until the eve of launch; we need at least one RTG to heat us when sleeping at night , and compared to the cramped interior of a mobile home, the MAV is almost as spacious as an airship hangar. So after completing the main modification tasks, we turned to secondary tasks such as replenishing fuel.

To separate oxygen and hydrogen from water, you only need to apply electricity to two electrodes. The real difficulty lies in collecting the hydrogen. An early version of the MAV design actually had an electrolysis device in the fuel generator; under this idea, the MAV would directly launch into the sky with a lot of water, and then decompose it to obtain hydrogen, which can then be synthesized from the hydrogen Rocket fuel. As for the carbon source of the fuel, it is carbon dioxide, which is one of the main components of the Martian atmosphere. The decomposed oxygen will also be stored and used as an oxidizer for fuel, and excess oxygen will be directly emitted into the Martian atmosphere.

But what was more unlucky for me was that a flexible nerd came up with a clever idea that could use the technical principles of an oxygen synthesizer to replace the original system that converts water and carbon dioxide into fuel and oxygen. This new idea is to have the fuel generator directly break down carbon dioxide and then consume its own stored hydrogen to generate methane. Carbon dioxide provides no more oxygen atoms than no less, just enough to synthesize a suitable proportion of fuel and oxidant, which means that the payload mass transported to Mars will not be wasted. Even taking into account the weight of the super insulated gas cylinders required to store hydrogen, as well as the margin needed to make up for the inevitable leaks and production losses along the way, it is far from enough to simply eliminate the weight of the raw materials carried during launch. Despite the immediate weight loss of 91%, the new system weighed less than half of the original system.

After talking so much, the final outcome is that the MAV's fuel generator cannot operate directly with water as raw material. There is no electrolysis device in the generator and there is no way to separate hydrogen from oxygen. All I can do here is replace the empty hydrogen bottle with a full one, then connect it to electricity and wait for it to work slowly.

The NASA engineers who are obsessed with lightweighting are really intolerable. How could they never have imagined that a bunch of idiots would be trapped on Mars for several years in the future, and then suddenly rush out like crazy in order to rendezvous with a rescue spacecraft at escape speed, need enough fuel to fill the tank, and risk their lives? What about the atmosphere? After all, this kind of situation can obviously happen to anyone. Don't make excuses for me.

Since the fuel generator cannot separate the hydrogen for us, we have to take a long way around. Fortunately, our No. 2 rover comes with a small tank air compressor; it relies on it to suck out the air when the airlock is operating, so that our precious oxygen and nitrogen will not be wasted on the ungrateful planet Mars. In a heartless world. With just one simple move, the air pump, whose original scope of work was limited to the airlock, can suck all the atmosphere in the No. 2 rover cabin into the tank.

However, after all this fuss, what we actually get is a bunch of mixed gas. That doesn't work. And because there is no equipment that can separate the mixture here, we naturally have to use magic to solve the problem. In fact, to put it bluntly, the spell we used this time was almost exactly the same as the one we used last time to clear out the accumulated methane in the cave farm. (Of course, we'll have to be more careful this time; if the airlock rips off its frame, we can't fix it.)

The whole process is like this. First, we isolated the No. 2 rover from the trailer and depressurized the cabin. Then we use that can of air to pump a little more into the rover to restore the cabin to about a quarter of normal atmospheric pressure; we still need a certain air pressure, otherwise the water will vaporize and disappear before we start electrolysis. Then we (using pony life-support system water drinking tubes) filled a plastic box with water, threw a few electrodes in, and let it run slowly on its own. After the run, we have a cabin atmosphere in which hydrogen accounts for about ten percent by weight, and most of the rest is oxygen molecules. We can read this data from the rover's atmospheric analyzer.

If you think doing this is equivalent to turning the interior of Rover 2 into a bomb, congratulations on your answer. If you're still wondering where Starlight Glimmer and I were while we were doing this, here's the answer - we were right at ground zero. Starlight would then cast her little spell, creating a force field barrier that separated the atmospheric sensors from the rest of the rover's cabin; this force field barrier would block any molecules above the weight of the nitrogen , but hydrogen can pass directly through the membrane. After a few simple manipulations of the force field and a flash of movement, the hydrogen gas naturally flowed into the bubbles. The whole process relies on the atmospheric analyzer to tell us when progress will begin.

Once we've created the bubble of 1% pure hydrogen, Starlight will move it away from the analyzer and toward the airlock, and then we'll wait until the analyzer shows that the hydrogen content in the air in the rest of the rover has gradually dropped below %. , then I can start the airlock air compressor and pump the hydrogen we collected into the storage tank.

Each box of water is about fifty liters full and weighs fifty kilograms. This much water contains about 1400 kilograms of hydrogen, and every kilograms of hydrogen input into the fuel generator can produce about kilograms of rocket fuel. If we continue this process for twenty-five days and do it once a day, we will have a little more than kilograms of fuel in the end.

At this point you may be asking, why do we go to so much trouble to create this? With the MAV fuel generator working, shouldn’t the fuel tank have been filled by now? Well let me tell you, unfortunately that is not the case.

The fuel tanks on the first and second stages of the MAV have a little extra capacity for fuel and oxidizer, which can compensate for the loss caused by possible hydrogen leakage from the time the MAV leaves the earth until the stored raw materials are exhausted. The nominal design of the MAV is that under normal load conditions, it can reach a regular orbit after consuming approximately 18 tons of fuel. The fuel generator has also been calculated in advance and will produce a little more than 19 tons of fuel as a safety guarantee... But To make the MAV fully loaded, it would require a full twenty-one tons of fuel, coupled with a sufficient amount of oxidizer.

Thanks to the ponies' generosity in not caring about us drinking their planet dry, our water resources for electrolysis are unlimited. And with the solar panels mounted on the mobile home, we have enough energy to overclock the fuel generator system, so that the operating speed can be greatly increased, far beyond the normal range. Typically a fuel generator only produces about forty to forty-five kilograms of fuel per day; with the extra power, we can double that output. In fact, we can increase the speed a lot without the risk of overload damage or accidents, but there is no need to go so extreme; now the hydrogen we get after one round of electrolysis is enough to produce 72 kilograms of fuel, and we can continue like this. If accumulated, there will definitely be enough time to fill up all the remaining space in the storage tank.

This is our only safety redundancy. After we stripped so many things from the MAV, any damage from now on would pretty much mean we were screwed. But in this way, we will be able to gain 10% more speed than before (not counting magic boost); then if we lose a rocket engine or magic booster, we can still rely on Extend the push time to make up for the difference.

Looking at it from another perspective, it is actually quite a pity that we have so much water that we can’t even use up. Otherwise, I can actually directly electrolyze urine. After all, the main component is water, which is quite easy; and in this way, I can brag for the rest of my life that a real tough guy can use it as rocket fuel if he peees it out. But on second thought, I have a feeling that my guests are glad we don't have to resort to such measures; the mobile home smells bad enough as it is, and the smell of boiled urine adds fuel to the fire.