Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-05-10

Thin Air, Decanted

The plant drinks the thin air and sets the day's output out in a row, nearest first, the way stock is set out on a shelf.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A Martian plain at twilight under a violet sky combed with streaks of dust laden air that curve down towards the right. Three bell mouthed intake ducts of unequal size stand in a rising diagonal line, their openings turned up into the wind, each duct sweeping down into a small lit compressor house at ground level. Beside them a long horizontal drum lies on saddles with warm light spilling from underneath it. Running down towards the viewer at the left, three upright storage vessels of increasing size share one rounded silhouette: each has a flared base skirt, a narrow level window glowing amber or pale blue, a coloured band near its crown, and pale frost climbing the wall only as high as the liquid inside, so the nearest and largest vessel is barely filled while the furthest is nearly full. A suited figure the height of a valve stands at the foot of the middle vessel. In the right foreground seven hand sized canisters of the same design stand on a low shelf, and a rank of tilted solar panels catches the low sun on the far skyline.
An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: a plant on Mars breathing in the thin atmosphere and setting the day's output out in a row, every vessel from the hand canister to the reactor drum built to one design. Propellant made on Mars really is proposed to work this way, by capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide and running the Sabatier reaction with hydrogen to make methane and water, and NASA's MOXIE experiment on the Perseverance rover did produce oxygen from Martian carbon dioxide. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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