Magnets may help humans breathe in space

According to the report on August 28 on the website of the Spanish newspaper Abesai, on August 30, the reference news website, human beings hope to settle down on the moon and land on Mars in the next ten years. Or at least that's the idea. However, there are still many technical problems to be solved. How to plan a journey of more than 100 million kilometers (one-way), which will take at least one year, and during this period, the personnel on board must be able to live independently, including emergency medical treatment, and produce their own resources (including food or the air they breathe). As space becomes the new colonial "Wild West", more and more talents, companies and resources are used to solve these problems that only existed in science fiction not long ago.According to the report on August 28 on the website of the Spanish newspaper Abesai, on August 30, the reference news website, human beings hope to settle down on the moon and land on Mars in the next ten years. Or at least that's the idea. However, there are still many technical problems to be solved. How to plan a journey of more than 100 million kilometers (one-way), which will take at least one year, and during this period, the personnel on board must be able to live independently, including emergency medical treatment, and produce their own resources (including food or the air they breathe). As space becomes the new colonial "Wild West", more and more talents, companies and resources are used to solve these problems that only existed in science fiction not long ago.
According to the report, a team led by Alvaro Romero Calvo, from Granada, Spain, who is currently an assistant professor of the Guggenheim Institute of Aerospace Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology, has proposed a relatively simple but still unknown idea: to separate different components from liquid using magnetic iron. For example, hydrogen (which can be used to propel spacecraft) and oxygen (which can be used for astronauts to breathe) are separated from water.
The usual logic makes us think of carrying oxygen bottles for exploration, just as we do on earth. However, in the case of space travel, this idea does not work: it is extremely expensive, or even impossible, to carry all the resources for such a long journey, because it will occupy the space and load capacity of the spacecraft, resulting in having to have a larger spacecraft, and therefore consuming more fuel (as well as other problems). For example, on the International Space Station, it is no longer necessary to transport gas tanks for astronauts, but to prepare oxygen that astronauts rely on to maintain their lives through a process called electrolysis: in this case, electricity is a tool to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen.
In addition, it must be able to extract the gas generated by the system, which is a rather complex task in space. "For the sake of understanding, we can imagine a can of soda water: on the earth, because the liquid is denser than the gas, and is affected by the gravity of the earth, the bubbles in the soda water will separate and float to the upper part of the soda water," Romero Calvo explained. "On the International Space Station, the microgravity environment will produce a continuous free fall effect and eliminate the buoyancy effect, and the substances in the soda water will become more difficult to separate." With a large "centrifuge", the International Space Station separates these "bubbles" from other components. But this will cause vibration on the space station, which will interfere with the scientific experiments in the station.
However, the biggest problem is that the system of "discharging" bubbles is a complex mechanism, which is composed of many parts, and each part may fail, thus causing the equipment to fail to work. When astronauts alone perform a mission that lasts for several months, once the system that prepares the air for their breathing fails, it will cause a critical situation. As mentioned earlier, carrying an air receiver is an option, but not the most effective. According to Romero Calvo, a simple neodymium magnet can almost "naturally" achieve the desired separation effect at low cost, so this may be a good option.
Romero Calvo said: "Although it sounds strange, water and other liquids are 'magnetic' to a certain extent. More precisely, any liquid will polarize in the presence of a magnetic field. Specifically, water is a diamagnetic material, which means it will be repelled by magnets. On Earth, we hardly notice the 'repulsion' of water. But in space, this becomes a force that can be used to separate bubbles."
With this feature of the magnet, bubbles can be separated from the liquid through the device developed by Romero Calvo team. He said:

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