<story><title>NASA can now reliably produce a tree’s worth of oxygen on Mars</title><url>https://singularityhub.com/2022/09/04/nasa-says-it-can-now-reliably-produce-a-trees-worth-of-oxygen-on-mars/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>knodi123</author><text>&amp;gt; to make, say, iron&lt;p&gt;?  but iron is an element?</text></item><item><author>PaulHoule</author><text>The carbon monoxide is possibly more valuable than the oxygen.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a good feedstock for making hydrocarbons and petrochemicals and also as good a reducing agent as hydrogen for making metals.  In fact you could use the CO to make,  say,  iron,  producing CO2 which gets cycled back into the above reactor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>Carbon monoxide helps reduce iron oxide to iron [1]&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;chem.libretexts.org&amp;#x2F;Bookshelves&amp;#x2F;Inorganic_Chemistry&amp;#x2F;Supplemental_Modules_and_Websites_(Inorganic_Chemistry)&amp;#x2F;Descriptive_Chemistry&amp;#x2F;Elements_Organized_by_Block&amp;#x2F;3_d-Block_Elements&amp;#x2F;1b_Properties_of_Transition_Metals&amp;#x2F;Metallurgy&amp;#x2F;The_Extraction_of_Iron&amp;#x2F;Iron_Production&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;chem.libretexts.org&amp;#x2F;Bookshelves&amp;#x2F;Inorganic_Chemistry&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>NASA can now reliably produce a tree’s worth of oxygen on Mars</title><url>https://singularityhub.com/2022/09/04/nasa-says-it-can-now-reliably-produce-a-trees-worth-of-oxygen-on-mars/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>knodi123</author><text>&amp;gt; to make, say, iron&lt;p&gt;?  but iron is an element?</text></item><item><author>PaulHoule</author><text>The carbon monoxide is possibly more valuable than the oxygen.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a good feedstock for making hydrocarbons and petrochemicals and also as good a reducing agent as hydrogen for making metals.  In fact you could use the CO to make,  say,  iron,  producing CO2 which gets cycled back into the above reactor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>im3w1l</author><text>He means that you use carbon monoxide and iron-compound-rich mars dust to get elemental iron and carbon dioxide.</text></comment>